Mr. Speaker, first of all, I want to say that the softwood lumber industry in Atlantic Canada is extremely important to our economy. As the parliamentary secretary said earlier, this is all about forest management practices. I know he and his colleagues are working very hard on this, but I have been through several of these and they are all complicated.
Over the last 20 years, the American industry has acknowledged that Atlantic Canadian provinces have forestry practices exactly like theirs and because of that they have provided a total exclusion for all the Atlantic provinces on this softwood lumber agreement. We have not been part of it. In fact, the second last agreement had three signatures on it: the Canadian government, the U.S. government, and the Maritime Lumber Bureau. Considering how important it is to Atlantic Canada that we maintain this total exclusion, can the parliamentary secretary tell us whether an exclusion will be part of the next agreement?