Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It is a pleasure to see all of our witnesses again. This is deep and broad forestry knowledge in front of us. This committee and all Canadians should be grateful for it.
The softwood dispute is both long-standing and, of course, now rapidly moving. Government programs will need to adapt. I want to take a moment here to say that we welcome written feedback as a committee, of course, but because of the speed at which it's moving, I hope you are, in parallel, going to reach out to NRCan or my office. We will continue to evolve programs and the levels of support.
The United States is the world's largest economy. Our softwood lumber meets a demand the U.S. can't fill. We've heard that from many witnesses. The current situation of unjustified tariffs and duties needs to be resolved. There's absolutely no question. It hurts us, and, as Mr. Krips noted, it also hurts U.S. consumers. We can't replace their demand. They can't replace our supply, not on any sensible time frame.
Their leverage is reduced and ours increased with every per cent that we diversify markets, which includes new export markets and also the domestic markets that Mr. Danko was starting to talk about. On that point, I have a few questions.
One of the government's priorities outlined in the budget is to make the Government of Canada a bigger consumer, to “prioritise projects that use Canadian lumber”. There are commitments “to prioritise Canadian materials [and] require companies contracting with the federal government to source Canadian lumber.”
As we're doing this, I'm curious as to what the federal government needs to keep in mind for that to be successful. It's obviously an ecosystem. Obviously, we have to think in terms of clusters and access to those homebuilding markets. Maybe we'll start with Mr. Krips. Any thoughts you have on that would be greatly appreciated by this committee.