Mr. Speaker, the hon. minister is highly expert in this area and knows the complexity, as well as anyone in our country, of the industry in British Columbia and that it is not uniform. There are companies which have very different interests from the interior to the coast. There are value added forest product companies that are not in agreement with this.
The Premier of British Columbia is coming to town and I am sure many of us will meet with him tomorrow. I will be very interested to hear from Premier Campbell on two issues.
First, we are perhaps feeling a lot of pressure on our own sovereignty, provincial sovereignty in this case, in terms of pressure from outside the country on forest practices in British Columbia. All of us have denied from the beginning that there was any subsidy. The Minister of International Trade and myself have both said in the House very loudly that this is about protectionism not about subsidies. Yet British Columbia has been forced to adapt forest products in any event, and that is troubling looking into the future in terms of our sovereignty.
Also, I am worried about, and I will be interested in how we will work together with the government of British Columbia and now Alberta, how we will deal with this surge in production because of the mountain pine beetle infestation and how that will play into this agreement. We will be scrambling for international markets other than the United States to have some place to sell this wood that will be cut at a much higher rate, but we will be unable to sell it into the United States under this agreement. That should be of real concern to us.