Mr. Speaker, I have a question to put to my colleague, the member for Chicoutimi—Le Fjord. Today a good number of Bloc Québécois members have talked about the tensions and grief caused by these negotiations, and the fact that this is a bad agreement causing many problems. My colleague comes from a region similar to mine, a place where people work very hard in the forests.
I will ask my colleague a question about sovereignty in these negotiations between Canada and the United States. I am going to speak in English since the copy I have of the agreement is only in English.
Article XVII, the anti-circumvention section, is very important. For the people who listening and watching understand, under the statutes, the federal government cannot impose any type of administration or delegation of duties to the provinces on how they manage their forestry industry. Yet in article XVII paragraph 1 it says that neither party shall take action that circumvents or offsets the commitments set out in this agreement. Paragraph 2 is very interesting. It states that any change in a provincial timber pricing or forest management system, as it existed on April 27, 2006.
Suddenly we have a clause built into the agreement that even the federal Government of Canada does not have, which is to look at the practices of a province and if they are in disagreement with that practice, it can demand the province to change it. If it does not change it, then suddenly we are on the wrong side of the deal.
So we can easily break the agreement. This is a matter involving the sovereignty of Quebec, of Ontario and of the other provinces, the sovereignty that enables the provinces to manage forest activities on their territory as they see fit.
I would have thought that the Bloc Québécois would want to protect this sovereignty, but it is taking the opposite direction to sovereignty in their province and the country.