Mr. Speaker, the bill is an act to provide compensation to Canadian industry associations and the Canadian exporters who incur financial losses as a result of unjustified restrictive trade actions by foreign governments.
In the instance most of us are talking about, we prefer to talk about softwood lumber because that is a current example. However, my friend from the Bloc from Joliette is quite correct, this applies to a lot of potential disputes, not just within our NAFTA arrangement but within other arrangements.
I have a fairly long involvement with the portion of the bill that deals with what is being called loan guarantees. I prefer to call it government backing of a receivable because that is what it is.
The government chose, with a Friday afternoon announcement, to back, through EDC, very poor risk receivables with some of the airlines that were purchasing Bombardier products. We now have three companies, which are insured for $3.7 billion by EDC, in chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. The maximum we are asking for here, on a go forward basis, because we cannot make this bill apply going backwards on the softwood dispute, is about $2.4 billion. That would be virtually a guaranteed receivable because we are not talking about money that is sitting with a poor risk. These are cash deposits sitting with the U.S. government. This is a whole different equation. We are looking at a two year window. It deals with the court enforcement of a final NAFTA decision.
The reason I have had quite a bit of background on this is that in 2002 the Free Trade Lumber Council made a proposal to the trade minister of the day and the trade minister of the day turned it down on the basis that there were too many things going on in NAFTA and it wanted to see how this would play out.
Last year the lumber council once again approached the current trade minister and was told that the government wanted to wait until it saw the final decision from the NAFTA panel on threat of injury before it did anything.
August 10 was the big day, the day of the long awaited decision on threat of injury, the long predicted big win for Canada and, guess what? In September the six trade associations from British Columbia to Alberta and Ontario to Quebec jointly made this request of the current trade minister and basically were told no. Have they been told no based on any rationale? No, they have not. Have they been given any indication of why the government is saying no? Only to the standpoint that this might be rather irksome to the U.S. Well, guess what? The reason the Canadian industry saw the need for this kind of program is that it knew the U.S. Department of Commerce would be unreasonable in the tariffs it arranged.
The U.S. has now passed an amendment called the Byrd amendment which distributes these moneys, ultimately to the U.S. complainants, the industry that launched these very complaints against the Canadian industry, in other words, its competitors in the U.S.
Canada's answer to the Byrd amendment, which is the only way it could fight the amendment, is contained in the bill. It is contained in the proposal accepted by my caucus in 2002, along with the Bloc and the NDP. We held a joint press conference announcing our support for such an endeavour. We are still there but the government has never been there and is still not there.
What is the government doing to send a message to the U.S. that we are serious about winning when we have actually won legally? We want our money back. I do not know a stronger way to deliver that message than to carry out this kind of measure. The result of this measure would be that the government would say to companies that they have a receivable and that they have suffered three and a half years worth of requirements to pay a total now of almost $5 billion into these accounts but they cannot call those receivables.
The cumulative weight of all of that is now bringing companies to their knees, which is exactly what the U.S. lumber coalition wants. However we cannot go for another two years because it will not serve our national interests. It is time for the government to step forward and to back our forest industry in the same way it has been prepared to back our aerospace and other industries. This would actually be a lot cheaper. This is the way to go.
However for the government to now argue that this is somehow an ill-considered proposal is contrary to all of the thought that has gone into this over the last three and a half or three and three-quarter years. The government has never actually given a technical reason why this should not proceed and, for every technical reason and for the national interest, it should proceed.