Traditional sovereignists, as my colleague from Skeena says.
I am just stating this clearly for the folks at home who may be watching. I am not sure that Canadians fully understand the impact of this hastily thrown together sellout of Canadian sovereignty. It is not only the dollar figure; perhaps this clause I have mentioned is even more damaging than the $1.3 billion we left on the table.
For the record, this is the second time that a Conservative government has snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory on a lumber file. For the historical record, I remind my colleagues in the House that in 1986 the GATT, the World Trade Organization's predecessor, issued a preliminary finding on the legality of U.S. lumber duties against Canada.
Brian Mulroney's government at the time, hell bent on negotiating a free trade agreement with the U.S., abruptly aborted the challenge that we were winning. The preliminary finding was issued in our favour, and even though we were winning and would have perhaps put this whole issue to bed at that early stage of this longstanding challenge, he aborted it, so the findings were never officially published.
It does not take a suspicious mind to assume that Mr. Mulroney did not want the ruling to become part of the permanent record. He did not want to offend the Americans in any way at that fragile stage of his newly crafted free trade agreement. I can only say that I cannot condemn enough that kind of sellout of Canadian sovereignty and well-being.
Let me make a comparison that I wanted to draw in my opening remarks. There is a connection to be made. The Conservative government is doing the Americans' dirty work for them, not only on this big trade irritant that was the softwood lumber issue, but also on the Canadian Wheat Board, which has offended Americans for years. The Americans do not like this collective action on the part of Canadian farmers.
The Americans filed 11 separate trade challenges against the Canadian Wheat Board and lost every single one of them, but now the Conservative government has promised to do what the Americans could not do by any legal challenges. The government has served notice that it intends to do away with the Canadian Wheat Board in spite of all the empirical evidence that the Canadian Wheat Board serves the interests of Canadian farmers well and is an important prairie institution.
I will take members back in history again. We should take note of the fact that there was a dual market voluntary wheat board at one time. It failed in one of the most catastrophic bankruptcies that Canada had known to that time. It failed in 1935 in a spectacular bankruptcy.
We know that the dual desk cannot work for one simple reason, that is, if the initial offering price is higher than the market price, the Wheat Board will get all kinds of grain delivered to it and will have to sell the grain at a loss, and if the initial offering price is lower than the outside market, the Wheat Board will not get any deliveries. Then, boom, the board will be out of business in one or two years.
We know that it will be the death rattle of the Canadian Wheat Board to do away with single desk marketing, yet the government seems to be on a mad crusade to do the bidding of the Americans, to do their dirty work and do away with this great prairie institution.
Those of us on the NDP benches shake our heads and wonder why--