Mr. Speaker, the member for Simcoe—Grey is right about one thing. We did not capitulate during the 13 years. We tried to take the process through to completion.
I find it interesting that she talks about the administrative review. This is where the Prime Minister went down to Washington or Cancun and at that point in time President Bush had the opportunity to waive the administrative review; in other words to use his special powers to overturn the appeal request. So he was down there, they were all buddy buddies, “Steve” and George Bush. What did the government get? It gets this contrived agreement which sells out the industry and sells out Canada's sovereignty and foreign policy. What does the government get? It gets assurances about military cooperation and so on. President Bush looked pretty good.
The problem is that this government said it would not support the industry. The reality is that if we leave $1 billion on the table, and contrary to the challenge of the Byrd amendment which says we cannot take that money and send it back to the U.S. producers, and again the U.S. has totally ignored that, that money goes back to the U.S. producers. Yet, the Canadian producers are sitting there trying to fight the softwood lumber deal. The Canadian government said I think they were bluffing because they could not have actually lived through that because the industry would have had to have support from the government to fight the softwood lumber deal. Therefore, this was a contrived deal and the industry was coerced into agreeing to it.
I have just a final point. I know it is hard to imagine that we could outlast the U.S. on this, but the reality is that some of the big producers like Georgia-Pacific and International Paper were actually bailing out of this coalition in the United States. They were the people with the big bank roll. They were financing the coalition to challenge this agreement.
If the government had stuck to its guns the way it had said it was going to do when it was in opposition and said $5.3 billion, no money to the U.S., then we may have found that the U.S. coalition might have started to tire of this.
I know it is hard to conceive that we would tire them out, but they are just as tired of this as we are and we are winning in every single way. I think the government should have done its intelligence and its strategic thinking a little better and I think there was an option there to say that we were going to outlast them. I think the deal is a bad one and should be rejected by the government.