Madam Speaker, the senior minister from British Columbia is not even here. He is muzzled and the trade minister is somewhere else. That is displaying a sense of lack of priority. That is clear to me.
I have noticed that the government has been busy revising history on the softwood file for the last two or three months. The whole thing about a border tax is an attempt to obscure the real issue. A border tax would be very negative for Canada. It would not make us competitive in terms of our entry into the U.S. market. In order to meet the qualifications of a border tax we would have to increase our costs on the Canadian side in order to eventually get rid of the border tax. That would make us uncompetitive in all those other markets as well.
I am taking a clear position unlike the government that obscures everything so that nobody can figure out where it is coming from until two weeks after the event.