Madam Chair, first, let me comment on the rising volumes of our exports of lumber to the United States. No doubt this does reflect the competiveness of the Canadian product and the quality of that product. It also reflects something else. We need to point out to our American friends that it also reflects the failure of the entire approach to the countervailing and the anti-dumping duties.
These duties have forced Canadian mills to actually increase production to lower unit costs in order to pay the duties. To the extent that what the American industry wants which is to protect itself from Canadian imports, its strategy has actually had precisely the opposite effect. That is why the President and Congress should abandon it.
What do we do to advance this? What can we do in a concrete sense? We do not do what the member hinted at and what other members of the Liberal Party have hinted at. We do not hint at threats about not sending energy or other commodities to the United States. What we do is we point out the common interests we have in resolving this dispute and the common interests we have in getting our trading relationship back on track.
When this dispute reached the present stage, the present impasse, the Prime Minister should have called the President right away to make all of these points and to point out that the interests not only of the lumber industry but of the entire trading relationship were at stake.
I believe that because the Prime Minister and the President cannot speak at great length about this, they should have at least agreed on the fact that our relationship was important and it was being jeopardized. They should have agreed to appoint special envoys to continue their direct dialogue between them in order to understand the importance of the relationship and to seek a way whereby the United States could comply with its legal obligation and we could in fact strengthen the dispute settlement process to avoid these kinds of impasses in the future.
This is an approach that was used by, if I dare say, Prime Minister Mulroney on the acid rain problem which was previously considered to be an unresolvable impasse. The United States simply did not understand and had no interest in that issue. However, by having that kind of relationship and that kind of dialogue at the highest level, I believe we could make progress on softwood lumber.
The difficulty I think all Canadians have, when they look at the poison path of the relationship between this President in particular and the Liberal government, is that the relationship is simply not there to positively move this forward without sinking right back into the kinds of negotiations that we want to avoid.