Mr. Speaker, I am glad the member for Vancouver Island North has raised this point again. He raised it previously in the House and I guess he was not listening. In 1996 and before I was elected I was working in the forest products industry. The then trade minister was Roy MacLaren. I was elected after Mr. MacLaren in Etobicoke North. Mr. MacLaren is a good personal friend of mine.
I was working with the forest sector advisory council on competitiveness issues. Mr. MacLaren came to my home one night and we were having some Christmas cheer, and he said that the forest industry in Canada was begging him, not the provinces and not the bureaucrats, the forest industry was begging him for five years of trade peace with a system of managed trade, which is the system of quotas. The forest industry was begging him and it was totally anathema to his view on free trade. He asked me what he should do?
I find it so repulsive that the parties opposite keep trying to tell Canadians that the five year softwood lumber quota agreement was an invention of the bureaucracy in Ottawa or the government at the time, or the trade minister. The industry begged for it. I know that for a fact. The member for Vancouver Island North should check his own history.
If he were to focus on finding better solutions to this countervailing duty process that is what we should be fighting for. We should be convincing the Americans that we should be implementing systems such as net subsidies, serious prejudice and looking at these issues through a competition policy instead of laying problems with the government.
The government has been fighting hard on behalf of all Canadians. We should identify the real enemy and go down to Washington and convince the Americans of their folly.