Madam Speaker, I thank the member for her great work on the trade committee. As a committee member of one, she does a tremendous job of putting forward her issues on a day-by-day, case-by-case basis. Good for you for doing that.
It is a busy committee. It is an exceptionally well-run committee and a good committee. We have a chair who understands that there will be disagreements and that we need to put them on the floor and talk them through. We have done some heavy listing in the last little while with a number of these agreements that are coming to fruition. I will agree with the member that good debate, disagreement on points, can bring about a stronger end result. If we do them with that in mind, we will make things happen.
I am as concerned as she is with the whole Canadian-American overarching agreement to disagree now that there has been a change of governance in the United States. President-elect Trump is already saying that he will approve Keystone XL. The Conservatives welcome that. We have to do that. This is a good opportunity to move forward.
However, at the same time, when we talk about resources, we have movement on Keystone XL getting oil and gas to market, which the U.S. needs, but we also need to move softwood lumber into that market. We have a 35% market share simply because it needs 35% to fill its market. The right hand is actually slapping the left hand in the U.S. at the moment, but at the same time we have a problem in Canada. There is not the recognition on the front bench to know how hard and how tough this will be.
The Conservatives took over as government in 2006, and I will give credit to my good friend David Emerson who actually crossed the floor, which is never an easy thing to do. He did it knowing that Prime Minister Harper was going to give him the opportunity to resolve that issue, and he did it within months. We had an agreement that continued on for almost 10 years, with the two-year extension that my good friend from Abbotsford was able to renegotiate.
The Liberals had a year to get this thing fixed, a year where everything goes quiet, the lawyers talk, and everybody agrees that we have to do something. Last March, they had a solution. It was going to take 100 days. The bromance was going to fix this. We were going to have a little hug and a love-in and within 100 days we would have an answer. That was 250 days ago. We do not need even have a direction, let alone an answer.
We are very concerned. We put together a softwood lumber task force—