Mr. Chair, there is more than a shade of irony here tonight that the NDP members get up and ask questions about respecting NAFTA and ensuring that the Americans respect NAFTA when their party position is that we should tear up NAFTA. Only the NDP would believe that somehow we solve trade disputes with our largest customer by taxing more of our exports.
The member, who is from the same province as myself, British Columbia, should take a little history lesson and look at the NDP government that we had and the bitter failure it was in British Columbia, to the point where its last leader was thrown out and it was reduced to only two seats by the people of British Columbia because they recognized that the NDP was crippling the economy of British Columbia through its ineptness and incompetence. What is unbelievable is that its leader ended up as a cabinet minister here at the federal level.
I do not know how the member has the audacity to suggest that somehow the Conservative plan of assisting our companies through loan guarantees and assisting our industry by covering the legal bills, which the federal government should be doing for our companies that are going through these disputes, is not a plan. These companies have had to spend millions of dollars.
I could not believe what I was listening to. The one thing I would agree with him on is that the real hurt is with the people, the people in British Columbia especially but all across the land, the people who work for our softwood industry. He cannot see the forest for the trees, which is so typical of the NDP. The reason the working class in Canada are working so hard is to pay their taxes in this overtaxed economy, which the NDP only wants to tax more. When the NDP negotiated its $4.6 billion last spring, Bill C-48, it somehow forgot all about softwood lumber.