Mr. Speaker, the member has provided clarity. The Liberal Party supports the softwood sellout. That is important for Canadians to know.
The idea that the Liberals are saying they do not support it, that somehow they would do it differently is wrong. The Liberals support the softwood sellout. That is good, because it gives Canadians a very clear choice between the Conservatives, Liberals and the Bloc and their proposal which has led to 4,000 lost jobs, and the NDP.
The member asked had we stopped this softwood sellout, what would have happened. We already know that we won in the Court of International Trade on October 13. Customs and border protection is already sending out 100% cheques to the companies. What the former Liberal government should have done and what the Conservative government we have been saying since January should do is provide funding to the companies. That is what has happened as well.
Through Export Development Corporation, taxpayers' money has gone to help support those companies.This deal with all of the sellouts involved, all the capitulations of the American government, the Bush administration, do not need to happen. The Export Development Corporation has already started using taxpayers' money to support the softwood industry as we said it should, and U.S. customs and border protection, as a result of the Court of International Trade decision, is already paying that money out. Had we stopped this; do we stop this now? What happens is we take off the export tax, we take off the punitive tax that companies are experiencing and we start to get back some of the 4,000 jobs we lost.
I have two questions for the member. The first is that for some time there has been an invitation for him to attend a public meeting on softwood lumber. I went to Thunder Bay with my colleague from Timmins—James Bay to debate the issue of softwood lumber. Why will the member not agree to a public meeting that the Steelworkers have asked him to have on softwood? Second, I have been tracking, certainly the NDP has been tracking, the number of lost jobs in northern Ontario. I would like the member to tell us how many hundreds of jobs have been lost since this deal was provisionally put into effect on October 11.