Thank you.
As I mentioned in my opening comments, we're what we would call a small to mid-sized company. We don't have the ability to go to the public markets to raise financing. I think of various operations that we've purchased, where we as a family have had to put our houses up for security—the total disclosure on the part of the family, the ownership of the company. We've had to put up that kind of security.
Back in 2006-07, when we received a duty return, we were right on the verge of losing one of our companies in a community of 8,000, where we have 350 employees. If you look at all the dependents and the spinoff benefits of that company, you see that it would have been devastating to that community. We were within an inch, if I can put it into a distance, of losing that operation due to the pressures we'd been experiencing through that particular softwood dispute.
It drains the financial capabilities you have for investing. Earlier on, people were using the term “certainty”, and I would say, well, my experience is that there's no such thing as certainty, but we do need predictability, and the dispute takes away predictability. We need to be able to plan for investments into the operations that support the families we have operating with us. The dispute just adds to the lack of predictability.