Madam Speaker, as a member from British Columbia I appreciate the time to ask some questions and make some comments.
It is important to reiterate to the member and the government the reason this is such an exceedingly important issue to Canada and in particular to my province of British Columbia. It is probably not known by the member that on a balance of trade net benefit basis the forest industry outperforms every other sector of export in Canada. It has a net benefit of some $39 million to Canada on the balance of trade. That is important. It employs about 130,000 people in Canada and as a high as 50,000 or 60,000 in the province of B.C. in work related to the forest industry.
The province of British Columbia has seen the complete devastation of the forest industry caused by to a very large degree the softwood lumber agreement we have had to work through over the last five years. It sounded pretty good in the beginning. We were to find a way to deal with the constant threats of countervail.
In fact, what has happened is that we have had a market distortion which has been disastrous to our economy in British Columbia. We have had the creation of mills that have quota and mills that have not. It is not a level playing field. Because of their obligation to the ministry of forests and to their timber licences to cut the wood and process it, they have had to in effect literally dump the wood in the domestic market at prices far below their costs to produce it.
It is having a disastrous effect and the government has to realize that. In the city of Prince George, which is almost wholly dependent upon the forest industry, the unemployment rate is somewhere around 17%. In my riding it is somewhere around 15% overall because of the softwood lumber agreement.
Our mills have simply used their quotas. They are into their expensive penalty wood. They have had to lay off people because they cannot afford to carry on business that way, so when I ask the government where the public display of good stewardship of our lumber industry has been, I am very serious.
There has not been a public display. The government has admitted that it has been working on it for the last year, but there has not been an expression to the people in the forest industry in British Columbia that the the government is working on this and understands the crisis and the severity of the situation. The government has left the forest industry and workers in British Columbia wondering whether on March 31 the world is going to come to an end for them. It is going to get considerably worse. They do not know that the government has been working on it, if indeed it has, but we will take the government at its word.
I would like to ask the member for Yukon if he understands that on March 31 the lifeblood of the forest industry in British Columbia will be at the highest crisis point it has been at in decades. If so, has he and will he, along with other members of the Liberal government, continue to impress upon the Minister for International Trade that we must not allow the Americans, by way of this large lobby group, to push us around on this like they have traditionally done?
Canada cannot buckle under on this one. The member from Thunder Bay said earlier that we cannot now move to another natural resource and start to rattle sabres at the U.S. That is exactly what the U.S. has done to us. It has singled out the lumber industry and wants to go to war on it. Why should it be fair for them when it is not fair for us? That is my question. How can we allow the Americans to zero in on lumber and say we are unfair when we are not prepared to say that if that is the way they want to play we are going to zero in on something that they really need? What does the member have to say about that?