Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise to speak on this today. I would like to say, as my other colleagues have said before me today, that the basic principle of the bill we do support.
Certain measures obviously have to be put into place. The clearer it is and the more explicit it is, the better that bill will be. It never hurts to reiterate to the government the one proviso which we have said at considerable length today to ensure that it understands exactly where our level of support is coming from.
When I first came to Ottawa I said that I was not here to oppose for opposition sake. I do not care about the statistics or how many we support, how many we reject, whether we support a government that we would ultimately like to replace. If it writes good legislation I will be the first to congratulate it. If it writes legislation that I think has some merit but that could be made better, rather than criticize we will try to show alternatives to amend it so that the bill which is possibly supportable could be made better. It could be something that we maybe are having a little trouble supporting which could be made into something which we could support. It would still be its legislation. It behoves the government to listen and carefully consider the amendments put in by the official opposition or another opposition parties. The bottom line is to get good legislation.
The chief thing we have asked for in this legislation is a measure that will take into consideration the downstream impact of what this bill might put into place. Something that we consider will show how it is going impact on industries in Canada and whether it is going to create a problem for some of those industries, and how is it going to impact on the consumer. It may be extremely well intentioned to put some countervailing duties or tariffs in place in terms of the fairness of the concept of it because it thinks that, in the case of the Gerber baby situation, it needs to be dealt with. It is irresponsible to put something like that into place before considering the impact on consumers. That is a glowing example for the government to look at. There are a lot of other examples out there.
It would be relatively simple for the government to move an amendment or to accept our amendment to ensure that these concerns are dealt with. I believe that all reasonable people, regardless of party, who look at this and give open minded consideration to our proposed amendments in this area will see the merit of them.
I would like to deal with one other aspect of this. We talk about downstream benefit, impact on people and other considerations with this legislation. We also have to look at and balance the other side of this. This is dealing with import, the Special Measures Import Act. What about export? Whenever we start putting into place regulations dealing with how we are going to treat imported goods from other countries, we cannot do that unless we take a serious look at problems, regulations needed or regulations already in place that are oppressive when dealing with our exports.
Because of the nature of my resource based riding, its proximity to the U.S. border and its absence of good transportation networks to other Canadian markets, the one I am most concerned about is the softwood lumber industry. Prior to free trade and under free trade we have had one problem after another with exports of softwood lumber to the United States. All kinds of outrageous claims have been made by the American administration. It claims we had subsidized our forest industry. This is ironic as right now British Columbia, with our NDP government, has placed the cost of producing B.C. lumber among the highest in North America.
In spite of that we still manage to stay competitive but the softwood lumber deal is killing us. Every time the United States' lobby managed to get some kind of countervailing tariff in place against softwood lumber we appealed it through the process and we won. We no sooner win then it comes out with another one in a different area for softwood lumber. We would fight that one and we would win. Still the threats kept coming. I will not say in its wisdom but finally the government, the bureaucratic system, decided that we should do something different. It was proposed to the government that we should go into the softwood lumber quota system.
I have had a lot of problems with the softwood lumber quota with a variety of different companies in my riding. I have gone to the softwood lumber division of foreign affairs. I have a pretty good sense of how this whole thing has come into play and how it works. Those people have been quite candid with me and I appreciate that because they have to work with what they are given.
When the quota system came in they did not have the slightest idea how it was going to work. Companies in my riding were told “we have no idea what your quota is going to be, just keep on shipping and keep track of everything, we will sort it out somewhere down the road and we will figure out how it is going to work”.
I can tell members how it works, terribly. One company in my riding basically shut down. People were shipping and using their number and softwood lumber could not even track it properly. We played the greatest numbers game for a year and a half. They operated from hand to mouth never knowing from one day to the next or one week or one month whether they were going to be able to sell anything they manufactured, whether they should even try to buy timber in order to turn into lumber because everything has to be done ahead. The last thing you need is an inventory of logs if you cannot cut it into something you can sell.
On the other hand, it does you absolutely no good to win on the softwood lumber quota war and find out you do have quota but you do not have any logs because you did not dare put in the kind of financial outlay that was necessary in order to have the inventory when you did get it sorted out.
We no sooner got sorted out with one company when another one, the biggest timber supplier and manufacturer in my riding, was told on each of three successive years that the quota it has will be held and it will not get any further cutbacks, and in each successive year it gets more cutbacks. It is a big operation with three locations in my riding. It has been told that the latest cutback that it was promised in the previous year would not happen is equivalent to the amount of output from its main centre operating in the riding. That means the company would shut down the entire operation in one city in my riding. It affects over 100 people.
This is not the kind of balance we need. When we start talking about import acts we had better take a very serious look at our export requirements as well because they go hand in hand. I am not pointing fingers at any party but in the past Canada through successive governments and bureaucrats negotiates with the United States on bended knees. That is not a Clinton joke.
We have to start dealing with a little more strength. We have to start saying that there is a quid pro quo. If you start doing unreasonable things with us we are going to make sure our act allows us to balance that out. We cannot have deals where maybe it is good for one area or region of a country and we say we will let this in because it is good but we do not care what is happening in another part of the country. Or we will balance it out by letting something good happen in that part of the country but which is maybe not good for the first region. That is not the way we should be working in this country. There should be an open fairness. The quote system does not provide that.
The way we have dealt with the United States prior to the softwood lumber quota does not do that. I do not see how we can enter into a new act to lay out the rules so that all the people who export into Canada know exactly what the rules are and those rules are perfectly fair. That is very utopian. Why are we providing other countries like the United States with a clear set of rules saying what we will do and how it will work? Then they can look at that and say now they know how to work the system but they also still get to turn the screws whenever they do not think something is quite right in coming into their country exported from Canada.
I think we have to come up with some way of saying this is what we are proposing to do but we have some problems with what you are doing to us and we have to resolve those first.
I remember going down to the United States as part of the Standing Committee on Transport a few years ago. One of the things we were talking about was the St. Lawrence navigation system into the great lakes, the locks, where we have this incredibly unbalanced system. We end up paying the majority of the cost of operating the lock system into the great lakes even though the American shipping system gets 65% of the economic benefit of making use of it. I believe that what is fair is we either at least split it or better still that we pay for it based on the economic advantage gained.
We had a meeting with some of the American big boys in Washington, D.C. and their reaction was that is the way it has always been and that is the way it is going to be. What are you going to do about it, close it down?
I think if somebody puts that type of bluff on the table we have to call them. When I was having that conversation I was getting more and more irritated talking to this American good old boy. My response to him when he put that idiotic question to me was obviously we do not want to shut down the navigation system of the great lakes but obviously you do not want it shut down either because you are getting more advantage out of it than we are. If you leave us no other alternative I guess we are going to have to look at that, and I walked away.
I think we need to deal fairly with these other countries but we need to deal with a little more strength. Internationally Canadians are known as those nice people who never raise their voice, those nice people who never argue, those nice people who when you hit them turn around so you can get a good shot at the other side.
I am tired of that. So are my constituents and so are the employers in my riding who are hurt by some of these acts that we come out with without thinking of the full ramifications, and employees especially, the everyday constituents in my riding who are impacted by these things, whether import or export.
In another part of my riding I have a tremendous agricultural area, the south Okanagan, and every year they fear the dumping of the American apple crop into the south end of my riding.
Yes, we need things that lay out clear rules we are going to follow in terms of imports but by God we had better have some very clear rules that go hand in hand with these things dealing with our exports as well. I do not think we can come in and put this all in place and say there, see how nice we are, don't you want to follow our example. They will say no because they never have in the past.
I believe we had better take a good hard look at this before we finalize it. By all means let us move on but let us do it cautiously. Let us put the amendments that have been talked about today in place with proper consideration for people who are going to be impacted by anything we do as a result of this act.
Then let us stop before we make that final passage and start dealing with the export side of it as well because any time we are laying out all our cards and being incredibly fair to our competitors without the competitors showing some evidence of fairness and laying their cards out as well, we are dealing with a blind hand and, as any poker player knows, we will lose every time.
I trust the Liberals will consider what is being said not to oppose them and not to run them down. It is being said very seriously to ensure the legislation passed in this House, not the Liberal legislation, the legislation passed collectively in this House, is good legislation and that everybody who participated in it can feel satisfied.