Mr. Speaker, I am thankful for the opportunity to raise this critical issue in the House tonight and to enter into the debate along with my hon. colleague who has just spoken.
The softwood lumber crisis has really influenced my riding. We have thousands of mill workers down in my riding who are very concerned. They are concerned about when or if they will get back to work, if they will have a job to go back to, if they will have a livelihood and if they can pay their mortgage. This is a serious issue affecting thousands of lives in my riding.
The job losses in British Columbia are mounting. On the coast we have between 12,000 and 15,000 Canadians out of work. We have 21 of 35 mills that are closed and another 5 may be closed in the next two weeks.
The latest employment numbers are now out. British Columbia has been hard hit with joblessness growing half a per cent in just one month to 8.3% in October.
Growth for the province, once projected to be close to 4% for the next year, is now predicted to be less than half that number by most bank economists.
Lumber companies have been hit hard. Virtually every company in the sector will lose money next year according to analysts at National Bank Financial.
The total hit companies are going to take will be in the range of $362 million.
The direct losses in the lumber industry are compounded by job losses in the support industries. As Brian Zak, spokesman for the B.C. Coast Forest and Lumber Association, said:
It's easy to see [the effect] if you go to Vancouver Island...you've got all the equipment suppliers shut down, you've got all the fuel carriers shut down, you've got all the power-saw shops and truck dealers shut down.
Mr. Zak is right. In my riding of Nanaimo--Alberni, thousands of workers and their families have been directly affected by this problem.
I want to mention a couple of those workers to help put a personal face on this problem.
In my riding there is a gentleman who lives just a few miles from my home. He is a constituent who manufactures a specialty heat exchanger unit. The technology was honed on the logging and forestry industry over the past 10 years. His equipment is used in hydraulics and refrigeration, fluids, pulp mills, logging trucks and yarders.
Last year his business grew at a rate of 65%. Since the softwood lumber dispute, his business is down 98%. He had seven employees. He is now down to none.
He has an opportunity to supply heat exchangers for the latest U.S. military order for between 7,000 and 12,000 light trucks. He needs a patent to protect the type of heat exchanger that he would use in this order should it come through next year.
Should he last until next year, he would be able to hire 10 people on a full time basis, provide profitable sales for his company and retain the manufacturing rights for an invention which other engineers say is the best improvement in the industry in the last 10 years.
A second constituent, another gentleman in my riding, is a planer man at Coulson Specialty Mill. The Coulson sawmill has been down since the softwood lumber duty came into existence and accounted for 105 jobs.
The Coulson planing mill is now down and Darcy is one of an additional 75 people thrown out of pay. He has a mortgage he will not be able to pay. He has tried to run a B&B as a sideline but there will be no income from that until next summer. He has some EI benefits that he will collect but they will not meet his monthly bills.
I would also like to relate some of what the mayor of Port Alberni, Mr. Ken McRae, has been sharing with me. As the mayor of a town at the centre of the coastal lumber industry, he knows the situation all too well.
Mayor McRae says that 40% of the community is in the 30 to 40 age group and out of work and they are devastated. In the past, shutdowns were known to be for a certain period but this one is indeterminate. He also claims that there has to be leadership on the federal level but the appearance at this point is that there is none. He said that smaller companies who support the community will collapse. He says that we must stop the export of logs from private lands, a federal jurisdiction.
As well, the mayor said that western red cedar should be exempted from this duty. He says that it is not a trade irritant and is unfairly included in the products the duty applies to, simply for the purposes of increasing pressure on Canada to capitulate.
Mill workers in my riding are getting desperate. Many, including the mayor of Port Alberni, are calling for a ban on the export of raw logs to the United States. They are joined by several other municipalities, including Courtney, Duncan, Ladysmith and Tofino.
Jack McLeman, president of the IWA local, says “No more raw log exports”. In a two week period, October 9 to 23, there were 177,000 cubic metres of raw logs exported to the U.S. Jack has been doing his homework. That is enough to keep a sawmill with 400 employees busy for one full year. The problem is that sawmill is not in Canada. It is in the United States. Extrapolated, it will be one million cubic metres by year end. This is a substantial increase over what we have been exporting in the past. Normally there are three million cubic metres a year.
At a time when our mills are shut down, it is highly inappropriate and offensive to people to see U.S. mills gearing up to mill the logs with which our workers should be working.
The workers, the unions and the mayors hope to place pressure on U.S. mills to help reach a solution to this dispute. They believe our government needs to take a harder line.
A raw log ban is something that may have to be considered but there are three things the Government of Canada could do immediately before committing to such a move: get behind our industry with a guarantee for bonds, have the Prime Minister get personally involved and convene a national meeting of softwood stakeholders. We have been calling for that for some time. People at our end of the country do not understand why the government has been slow to move to this call.
I would like to focus on the third point for a moment. Last week we had a parliamentary secretary refer to some softwood producers as nervous Nellies. He claims to have apologized for that remark but in fact he did not. He then went on to say "We are calling on people not to play the east versus west divide game. That is what the United States is hoping we will do". I could not agree with him more.
With the second remark of the parliamentary secretary, we do want to present a united front to the Americans. If they are able to play off Canadian interests one against the other or Canadian provinces against each other we will surely lose. However, if the government really believes in presenting a united front, why not call a national stakeholders meeting that we have been demanding for many months now?
Unfortunately, the government will not do that. It tells us to trust it because it has the matter under control. The fact remains that we have had over five years to resolve this problem and we are no closer to free trade in lumber than we were the last time that the government caved in to American demands.
David Emerson, president of Camfor, which has just launched a $250 million lawsuit against the U.S. over the issue, has called on the Prime Minister to get personally involved. We have had some fine rhetoric from the Prime Minister but no action for five years.
The last hike in the countervailing duty smacks of desperation on the part of the Americans. They know we will beat them at the WTO just as we have beaten them at tribunals three times before. They know the commerce department will settle on a much lower permanent duty than the present countervail. However, to sustain our industry, we need the government's help.
We need a guarantee on bonding for our smaller producers. We need a national stakeholders meeting. We need strong leadership from the trade minister and from the Prime Minister.
Canadians, I am afraid, are losing faith in this government to do what needs to be done to protect Canadian jobs, Canadian families and Canadian interests. Perhaps they are right. Perhaps the government has been in power too long. Perhaps the nervous Nellies are actually those sitting on the government side of the House unwilling to lift a finger in case they may rock the boat.
I remember when the first countervailing duty was introduced and the Prime Minister said that he had telephoned President Bush, had talked tough with the president and had told him what our feelings were in Canada about free trade in softwood lumber. The president said to him, “Tell them you gave me hell”.
I heard the trade minister say just yesterday in the House that he was going to talk tough to the U.S. trade representative.
We need more than posturing. We need real action. Canadians are looking to the government to provide leadership on this issue. The government must bring us some resolution so that our mill workers can have a future and our families can have a Christmas to look forward to.