Madam Speaker, I would like to reassure the hon. member from the Canadian Alliance by telling him that there are little cowboys, big cowboys, as well as good and bad cowboys, known as good guys and bad guys. The Americans are behaving like the bad guys.
It is true that the government has not been as proactive on the issue of soft wood lumber as it should have been. What happened was predictable. When answering questions in the House, the Minister for International Trade said, “They will abide by their decision, we almost sure of it”. The government should have sought alternatives.
As my colleague of the Canadian Alliance said, the government waited too much. Instead of being proactive, it chose the wait and see approach. How do you expect us to negotiate with a country such as the United States when we have nothing on the table to convince them that if they do this, we will do that?
The federal government representatives are not good guys. They are little cowboys who do not care about the workers' interests, and act only in their own interests.