Thank you, Joe.
Mr. Chairman, I'm going to keep on track. I have copies for everybody of an article from The Vancouver Sun of two weeks ago about 10,000 forestry jobs gone in the last year alone. Those are in British Columbia, the undisputed logging capital of the world, quite frankly.
Of the 50,000 steelworkers we represent, 20,000 are not working today. And as Joe said, the real sad part is that this is in real Canada; this is rural Canada, single-industry towns. Most often, when you have people displaced in one-horse towns, it's a real problem. That is not recognized, by and large, in the big communities.
I'm not going to go into a lot of the history. You guys have heard this stuff too many times already.
As far as the future, what we have to do is to deal with softwood--that is, the softwood lumber agreement. If the crisis we're facing currently weren't bad enough, the industry has been served poorly by policy-makers.
I'm going to remind everybody that days before a U.S. court ruled the tariffs illegal and ordered the U.S. government to give back all of the $5 billion it had collected—all of the $5 billion—this government accepted punitive terms in exchange for an 80% return, and a softwood agreement that is hindering provinces and the government from helping their citizens. The softwood deal has to be revisited. Quite frankly, we think it should be turfed. It has to be revisited first and foremost.
We need healthy forests. We all know, and all of you guys have heard, about the pine beetle plague in British Columbia, which is starting to hit Alberta. The devastation is unprecedented. What we have to do is to redevelop a serious reforestation and intensive sylvaculture program. It isn't going to do anything for the markets today, but it can employ people today in their communities, keeping them active and keeping them buying things and supporting their communities in rural Canada. We need an intensive sylvaculture and reforestation program all across the country.
We obviously need to provide incentives for domestic manufacturers—not to do what we're doing today, but to do something different and better to get more value-added out of our projects.
As for the training that Joe and others talked about, we need to do some more serious training. But again, the key is to train people not for potential “what if” jobs, but to train them first and foremost, so that when this industry recovers—and it is cyclical and will recover, though it won't be this year, and maybe not even next year—all of our workers are properly trained to man the machinery and equipment to make this thing go when it kicks back again.
One thing that's been missing all across Canada is federal-provincial cooperation on log exports. Log exports are a crime against the citizens of Canada, quite frankly. We are exporting millions and millions of man-hours. The constant buck-passing, if you will, between the provincial and the federal governments has to stop. There has to be cooperation, so that we completely stop the export of raw logs and keep those jobs here in Canada.
One last thing I was going to touch on was the round-table summit. We do have to get all of the players from across Canada in the industry, and workers, to sit down and talk about what we can do, so that when this thing turns around, we are in gear and not idling. But we have to be in gear so that we can take off when this thing turns around.
Thank you very much.