Mr. Speaker, I am pleased today to speak in support of the good work that my colleague, the member for Burnaby—New Westminster, has done on highlighting the challenges with the bill.
The member had put together 25 reasons why the House, as Canadian parliamentarians, should not support the bill. I will not read all 25 of them, but there are a couple I want to highlight.
One is it gives away $500 million in funds owned by the Canadian softwood industry to subsidize the U.S. Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports. This coalition is the Canadian industry's main competitor. Everybody fully expects it to us this money to fund its next round on why the Canadian lumber industry is unfair to coalition members.
The deal can also be cancelled unilaterally at any time. It does not provide stability and predictability to the Canadian softwood industry. In basic terms, this agreement can be terminated unilaterally after 18 months without cause or explanation. The agreement can be terminated immediately by the Americans if they feel Canada has not complied with the terms of the agreement.
This leads me to a really important reason why we should oppose this. It infringes on provincial constitutional prerogatives by both Ottawa and Washington.
We do not want to have any kind of foreign oversight on our lumber industry in British Columbia. The softwood lumber industry in British Columbia is a critical element in our economic prosperity. We do not want somebody from outside telling us how to run our lumber industry.
The agreement does nothing for thousands of workers who have lost their livelihoods over the past five years. It will also potentially trigger significant job losses through further consolidation caused by quotas and export taxes which could cap market access and growth.
It is on these two points that I want to spend some time.
Back on October 13 the member for Burnaby—New Westminster issued a press release about 2,500 jobs lost in the softwood sellout and more to come. In the press release he talked about these job losses on the first six days after this agreement was announced and predicted there would be ongoing job losses.
Just recently, on November 16, Western Forest Products announced that it would be shutting down a mill in New Westminster. One of the offshoots of this is we know that some of these logs will be shipped south of the border as raw log exports and will have no benefit whatsoever to our local communities. I wish to read this quote from the United Steel Workers Western Canada director, Stephen Hunt, about the company's decision to close the mill. This encapsulates what we are seeing. He said:
It's crazy. It's like having food for nine kids, feeding eight and selling the last one's cheeseburger out from under him. When a company is given access to enough of our trees to run a mill and is still allowed to close it down, there is something very wrong in this province.
We have seen that happen so many times in British Columbia. This is just the last in a long line of mill closures. Ninety-five per cent of the land in British Columbia is Crown land. That means it is owned by the citizens of British Columbia. Surely in any other enterprise we would say that the beneficiaries of a publicly owned facility or any other owned facility would come back to the owners. We would say that the owners should receive direct benefits from that.
In British Columbia we are allowing, and the softwood lumber agreement exacerbates this, our resources to be shipped out of the province to be processed somewhere else with no direct benefit to the people there.
Let us talk about dollars and cents just for one moment. If we mill those logs close to home and if we look at secondary and tertiary manufacturing, we actually contribute to a tax base.
We cannot reduce everything to dollars and cents, but we certainly know that when we have mills operating in our local communities, we employee workers and they paid their taxes. This means we can continue to pave our roads and pay for our school taxes and all the other good benefits that come from good paying jobs in communities. Not only that, there are spinoff jobs. There are truck drivers, caterers, cleaners and mill repair companies. All those jobs stay in our community when we process the logs close to home. However, what we are doing is shipping the logs somewhere else for processing.
I know I have talked about Youbou a number of times in the House, but in this last ditch effort to hold back the softwood lumber agreement, it is incumbent upon me to remind people what happens to a community when we close down a significant operation. This is the Youbou story. It is an abridged edition. I would love to read the whole thing, but it is called “The Last Hurrah”. It is an article written by Keith Dickens shortly after the mill closure. It says:
On Friday, 26th January 2001 at 3:10 p.m. the last log was cut in Timberwests Youbou Sawmill. The thirty-six foot long fir log brought to a close seventy three years of continuous production at the Youbou plant and a proud sawmilling history for the communities of Youbou and Lake Cowichan. As the last moments approached a radio call was relayed throughout the plant, it simply said, “Last Log.” This was the signal for virtually every employee to gather around ‘A’ Mills, 42ft Carriage...
We are talking about 73 years. We are talking about generations. When I met with some of the Youbou sawmill workers, they told me about how their fathers, their brothers, sometimes their grandfathers had worked in this mill. It had been a proud tradition in the Youbou community, 73 years worth of proud tradition, and the company that it was closing it doors. One of the reasons it closed was because of raw log exports.
The article goes on to say that TimberWest wanted to close the mill so it could increase its raw log exports. After the mill closed, local citizens staged a log truck count to track the number of trucks leaving the Cowichan valley. Over four days, 450 full logging trucks were tallied. This represented about 9,000 cubic metres per day, or 1.8 million cubic metres per year, enough to keep a good sized mill running for between three and four years and provide 200 well paid sawmill jobs and probably 400 to 600 jobs in spinoff industries. Put another way, over a three year period, these jobs could have put as much as $19 million into the local economy.
We often have a tendency often to boil everything down into dollars and cents. We talk about the bottom line and about profit and loss. What we fail to talk about is the impact that this kind of sawmill closure has on people's lives. We had people who had worked at that mill for 25 or 30 years, and all of a sudden they were turfed out. To many of them, it was their whole life's work. It was their proud tradition to have worked in that sawmill.
I talked to these workers a couple of years later, and I continue to have ongoing conversations with some of them. Some of them have never gone back to full time, full year employment. Not only did we destroy the sawmill workers hopes and dreams for their future, but we also took apart their families. Some of these workers had to travel to other communities for work. Some of them have been unable to find steady work. We have not found a way to measure in dollars and cents the impact on these people's lives.
One thing I did not talk about was the lack of first nations, Métis and Inuit consultation in this process. It is another very good reason why we should not support Bill C-24. We should turn it back to the committee. We should ask it to do further investigation and a much more extensive consultation with the communities that are affected.
I urge each and every member of the House to vote against this flawed legislation. Let us do the good work we need to do to protect our forestry industry, our workers and our communities.
