Yes, I'll say that there's a lot of talk about getting a deal done, but it has to be the right deal for Canada, and that's the challenge here.
The other challenge here is that the folks on the other side of the border know how tough it is in Canada right now, and any time you're trying to negotiate and you know the other side is having a bit of a tough time.... That's a very difficult position to be in. I feel that for our mills, for our employees and for those communities.
I think we have to look at two tracks. I like what Lana was talking about. We have the here and now, the immediate. As you heard from other witnesses from the sector, we have some mills—especially the smaller, medium-sized mills and a lot of family-owned mills—that are really near the edge of the cliff right now. What can we do to help them? I hesitate to go into a lot of detail publicly about negotiating, because that's problematic as well. All I'll say is that I believe Global Affairs knows well the sensitivities there and the looming liquidity crisis that is before a lot of our mills in this country right now if this continues.
The other thing I'm worried about, in the longer term, depending on where the Trump tariffs go, is that our industry is very reliant on a strong U.S. homebuilding network to drive our businesses. We are expecting, getting into next year, that things will start to look better in terms of U.S. housing starts, but if we have broad-based inflation again in the U.S. over the next couple of years because of big tariffs, that's going to delay it, because those housing starts are not going to be where we think they need to be.
Those are a couple of the things we're watching.
The other thing, I would say—Lana talked about it—is market diversification, the promise of the forest bioeconomy: mass timber, government procurement and reinvesting in export market diversification. These are all.... We need to do the here-and-now piece, but we also need to do the piece for the medium term and the long term to sustain and grow our sector for tomorrow.