Mr. Speaker, I do realize that the time is short, but the parliamentary secretary did make a couple of statement to which I feel I must respond.
Number one, the parliamentary secretary made reference to the fact that we had a point in time when we had no trade critic. That is not the first time I have heard all of this. The important thing to recognize is that I was involved and responsible for the softwood lumber file as the forestry and mining critic and that went with me to international trade. If proof of that is needed, he can go to my website and see that when I was forestry and mining critic in June 2000 our softwood lumber position, approved by caucus, was right there. I wrote it.
In terms of the other statement that the parliamentary secretary made, that it did not really matter what the government signalled because automatically on March 31, 2001, we would revert to free trade, that is the very question we kept asking the government: Are you going to let it expire and go to free trade or are you going to extend it? There were a lot of signals that you were prepared to do it. All of Canadian industry wanted to know what you were going to do and so did the American consumer--