Mr. Speaker, so many ideas were put out by the member who just spoke, some of them a little silly and some of them very silly. At least he said something at the very end, which is a good way to end, when he talked about the government getting a little tougher.
There are a lot of measures the government could take. It has not done a damned thing yet and it is high time it did. I am glad to see that the hon. member is at least suggesting his own government should be held to account on these issues.
There were a couple of things he said that I find rather fascinating. He tried to sidestep or remove himself from the comments of the international trade minister who said there were no job losses from this dispute at all. However he did suggest that a lot of it may be exaggerated. Maybe when we come from a big urban centre those losses are not all that significant.
He should come out to my riding. My riding is a rural riding, not one that has forestry jobs, but one that is forestry dependent. He should see what the dispute has done to the people of my riding. I invite him to come out as my guest. I would be more than happy to show him around if he really wants to find out what is going on in the industry.
I would be interested if he would clarify his suggestion that one of the solutions might be for the Canadian Commercial Corporation to buy all the wood from the Canadian lumber companies. It would be the marketer of the wood. That might be good if there were a couple of big, huge industries. Coming from an urban centre that may well be how the hon. member thinks. We have a lot of small companies that operate in niche markets. They find their own special buyers that operate on special contracts.
How would he manage that right across the board when we have one super gigantic government corporation, which is an oxymoron in itself, trying to sell to all of the United States? How could that possibly work in an efficient manner?