Mr. Speaker, when it was apparent that there was not going to be a deal in time and that the countervailing duties were about to come down, my office received a call saying we would get help for all our unemployed forestry workers. That is not the answer we wanted.
In eastern Ontario, parts of Quebec, and parts of northern Ontario, our chief production is white pine and red cedar. Those products should never have been put into the softwood lumber agreement in the first place. Softwood lumber was for construction lumber. White pine and eastern red cedar are specialty woods. They were thrown into the agreement, and now here we are, asking again to have exclusions for these species.
I want to thank the hon. member for providing me with the opportunity to talk about this important industry. At the end of the day, the Province of Ontario keeps on shrinking the footprint of areas where forestry workers can actually harvest forests. We have the model of sustainable forestry for the world—for every one tree harvested, three are planted in return—but the federal government is not interested. It said from the outset that it wanted to change from being a resource economy to a Google economy.
In any case, the Liberals do not care about forestry workers, and that is the bottom line.