Mr. Chair, I think it is very clear that the question is how much emphasis the government places on the softwood lumber dispute. It dominates every discussion that we have with the United States. Since August 10 we have a list of discussions between the Prime Minister and President Bush; discussions between the Prime Minister and Secretary Rice; the Minister of International Trade has made calls and met with his U.S. counterparts; pursuing the litigation in U.S. courts as well as in NAFTA; pursuing this file in every legal forum; the hon. Minister of International Trade leading trade missions to find alternate markets; taking this message to the American people; and the Prime Minister's speech in New York.
The hon. member does not have to take my word for it. I noticed that in today's National Post , not normally a great source of inspiration for Liberals, there is a column by John Ivison, also somebody who generally does not speak well of us. The column is entitled, “A leader speaks with conviction”. In it he said that the Prime Minister spoke with conviction mainly on the trade dispute over softwood with the United States.
I do not think one has to look very far to see the commitment and the decisiveness of the Prime Minister, the Minister of International Trade and other ministers on this challenge. We in this nation need to speak with one voice. I think we are trying to do that as well as we possibly can. This is very serious. We are talking about a lot of Canadian workers. We are talking about a lot of money, $5 billion in wrongly taken duties that we need to have returned. There are very few things more important, if anything, than this for the Government of Canada at this point in time.