Mr. Speaker, I would invite the minister to tell the families out of work what a good deal this is. They tend to disagree and disagree strongly.
The reason for the losses of thousands of jobs is not that the lumber mills overproduced, as the minister said, but that the quotas allotted to those mills came in at far below expected levels.
Yesterday the minister refused to table a full list of quota allocations for the mills all across the country. I suspect the reason for the secrecy is that in this way only the minister and his staff know the whole picture. There is a large unallocated portion of the quota sitting in this minister's pockets.
It appears that the minister is refusing to disclose the entire allocation list because he wants to reward his Liberal friends with the unallocated-