Debates of Dec. 1st, 2021

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Chair, I will be sharing my time with the very hon. member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay.

It is an honour to rise here tonight. It is a challenge, with five minutes, to try to dig into this issue, which combines two of my practically lifelong interests and passions: protecting Canada's forests and dealing with trade agreements that tend to be unfair.

On this issue, we can all agree in this House, and I do hope we can adopt a team Canada approach, that the recent imposition by the U.S. of countervailing duties and anti-dumping rules that double the tariffs for Canadian softwood lumber are completely unfair and unjustified.

Where do we go from there? I would like to suggest a novel approach, but first I want to say what we should be doing as Canadians to help the forest sector. As many members here have said, workers are losing out, communities are losing out and businesses are losing out. We should be able to do something about it domestically without the risk of creating more arguments that Canada is subsidizing its forest products.

What could we do? We could try to ban, and I think we can ban, the export of raw logs so we can get logs to our mills for value added and keep people employed for use of the products not just in Canada or the United States but for export.

If we look at the way the Swedish forest industry created itself, it created itself for maximum value added and high value export of smaller amounts of timber, whereas Canada organized it for massive amounts of volume for low value export and very little value added. We could flip that around and try to create more jobs and protect the workforce.

We should look at doing more with mass timber wood construction of buildings. The bill that was put forward by the hon. member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay is now before the Senate. We supported it in this place and should continue to support it and get it done.

We also need to be doing whatever we can to find ways to let forest communities know, after the devastation in our province from pine beetle, which caused a lot of loss of jobs at mills, that we will fight for them.

This is where it gets more complicated, and I want to dive into it. The trade agreements are intractable. I remember when Art Eggleton, back in 1995, bought five years of peace in a softwood lumber agreement that lasted until 2000. I do not know how many will remember that. We had these stops and starts.

I agree with trade lawyer Larry Herman on this. We need a long-term commitment and a deal that lasts long term, which will take political will from both Washington and Ottawa.

However, the bigger picture here, which is new, is that the multilateral trading system is broken. We know it was Donald Trump who broke it, and for some reason, U.S. President Joe Biden has continued to keep it broken. When Canada wins, as we did in the summer of 2020 at the World Trade Organization when it was determined that our approach to forests was not unfair under the trade rules, the U.S. does not like it. It did not like the ruling, everyone complained about it and it appealed it. Guess what? It also said that this was further evidence that the WTO itself is not fair. It said that it kept losing, therefore it was not going to put judges on the WTO appellate bodies. There is a void, a broken system.

How do we unstick a broken system? We used to be challenged by the U.S. because it said it was our stumpage rates that created a subsidy. This time around it is saying that a renewable energy program to encourage the forest industry in New Brunswick to produce renewable energy is a subsidy.

Now, that gets interesting. We have the trade regimes all around the world interfering with climate action. We have rulings against India for doing solar energy. We have to make sure the trade regime stays out of measures to protect our climate. Maybe, just maybe, the hon. minister for trade and the hon. minister for environment and climate change might get the U.S. administration's attention by suggesting a new approach to really try to unstick the World Trade Organization and make it something that does not fight climate action but ensures that trade rules do not block climate action.

We are way overdue for a rethink of our global trading regime. Forgive the word “logjam” in this context, but there is a logjam at WTO created by the U.S. administration that broke the system under Donald Trump and wants it to stay broken under President Biden. It may just be possible, and I do not know how likely it is, to maybe get the Biden administration's attention, through John Kerry and others, to rethink the way these rules are being used, to put judges on the appellate body and to have a long-term vision that includes the climate sequestration benefits of forests.

[Eric Melillo, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

Madam Chair, I appreciated the speech from the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.

Something that has been talked about this evening, and I believe the member for Winnipeg North mentioned it, is that, as the government is dealing with this softwood lumber issue, it is concurrently looking at new markets for Canadian softwood lumber. I wonder if the member has any thoughts or comments on that approach.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Chair, there is a limited market when what we are selling are two-by-fours. If we were to do more in the value-added area, we could certainly imagine selling more of our wood products to Europe and Japan. Japan, in housing construction, has led the way in a lot of the wood construction housing.

I think we have to be creative and expand our markets, but we also have to do more with wood within Canada. Through COVID we have learned a lot about supply chains. Let us do more locally.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Madam Chair, I always enjoy listening to my Green Party colleague.

I would just like to ask her if she believes, as I do, that part of the solution for the forestry industry is to further develop what is known today as the bioeconomy, which significantly reduces the carbon footprint of many sectors of activity. I do not know what she thinks of that.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Chair, I thank my colleague from Jonquière.

I completely agree with him that there are benefits to using our forests with the green vision of the bioeconomy. There are several other forestry products that protect the climate and forests, which sequester carbon. It is vital that we consider the value of forests. These forests are worth more than what is earned by clear-cutting them.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Madam Chair, the hon. member for Saanich—Gulf Islands has been around here a lot longer than me and has seen this issue go back and forth so many times.

The softwood lumber dispute will sort of feel as though we have solved it, then all of a sudden, we are back into it again. I wonder if the member might give some thought to a more longer-term solution to this problem, so we are not constantly battling with our neighbour.

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Madam Chair, not only have I been around here a long time, I have been around forest policy long enough to remember back to 1982 and shakes and shingles, which sound like something really bad we could get if we did not have a vaccine.

We have been perennially dealing with what really boils down to U.S. protectionism, and the U.S. lumber industry has a lot of political clout. However, we have made changes. I mean, we used to be held up on the stumpage issue, and it was not wrong that there was an element of subsidy there, but that has changed dramatically. B.C., Quebec and the Maritimes have changed the stumpage policies to eliminate that notion of subsidy, but the U.S. is still able to play this game, even though it needs our lumber too.

A long-term vision is based on fair rules to protect a good bilateral trading regime that helps both countries. We should be able to get to that. So much of it is U.S. politics. Looking at what is happening right now, we hear commentators say that it is likely not to get sorted out until maybe 2023 because of the U.S. midterms.

That has nothing to do with our forest policy, and we cannot really blame the current administration as much as one likes to blame it for things. This is perennial, and it has bedevilled Conservative and Liberal governments, and provincial NDP governments, for decades. Finding a solution would be wonderful, but I think we need to open it up at a really high level to get action.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Madam Chair, I am happy to speak tonight on softwood lumber.

As people have been saying throughout the evening, this comes back and back again. If we look up the softwood lumber dispute on Wikipedia, it goes on and on, with “Lumber II”, “Lumber III” and “Lumber IV”. It is like world wars or Super Bowls. I think even Wikipedia has given up on where we are now, because it stops at “IV” and I think we are at “V” or “VI” by now.

It is an intractable problem, and I agree with the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands that it is driven by protectionism, not logic or fairness. The Americans know that we depend on them for our lumber market, and they know if they put enough barriers in place, put down these unfair tariffs, clog up the courts for years and years and stop putting people on the WTO appellate bodies so that system does not work, mills will go out of business before we can get a fair ruling.

I think what we have to do is find a new strategy that will gradually move us away from the United States. The United States depends on us, and I think at some point they will realize they are hurting. I have been to Washington and have talked to senators and congressmen about this, and some of them get it.

Our forests are changing. We have had devastating fires in British Columbia. We have had beetle pandemics. The weather is changing too. I just talked to my wife, and in my hometown of Penticton it was 22.5°C today. That is a new Canadian record for December. That is perfect pine beetle weather; they love that kind of winter weather. Who knows where we are going to end up next year with our forests?

I am not the first to say this and I will not be the last, but we have to find ways of driving more economic value out of every tree we cut down. We all know that we have cut down a lot of trees and we are running out of our old-growth forests. We have heard that time and again.

Whenever we cut down a tree, we have to get the maximum value out of it, and I think one thing we can do, as the member just mentioned, is use mass timber. Canada leads this technology in North America. We have Structurlam in my hometown of Penticton, Chantiers Chibougamau in Quebec and Kalesnikoff Lumber in Castlegar, on the other side of my riding. These are three world-leading plants that make mass timber.

We can have sawmills around Canada producing two-by-fours and two-by-sixes and selling them to mass timber plants to create building materials to build more of our buildings out of wood and build larger buildings out of wood. This is how the big buildings of the future will be built. As already mentioned, I have a private member's bill about using that sort of wood or any material that will help us in our climate action and bring down the greenhouse gas emissions in our buildings. That bill is in the Senate now, and I hope it will come back to us in the spring and receive a good welcome here.

We also have to do something that will increase our markets domestically. We tried to increase our markets in Asia, particularly in China, and that worked for a while. However, to put it mildly, I think that has hit a bit of a headwind. I do not know if we can go much further in China at the moment, but we have the opportunity to build a much larger domestic market that would take the pressure off our sawmills.

We could sell mass timber in the United States without tariffs. It does not qualify for the softwood lumber tariffs we are talking about. That is one solution we should be looking at. We would have to educate our architects, change our building codes and educate our builders, but we should really look to that solution to get more value out of our forests. We should also monetize our forests for means other than fibre: for the water they protect, for the flood protection they provide and for the carbon they sequester.

I will leave it there.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Madam Chair, I wonder how my hon. friend feels about the fact that in this take-note debate tonight, which is a very important debate, not a single cabinet minister from the government has participated in the it. It is crucially important and I wonder how he feels about that.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Madam Chair, this is an important debate. The forestry industry in Canada is hugely important. We have heard of the forest workers who are affected. In British Columbia, we hear a lot about energy and oil workers losing their jobs in Alberta and Saskatchewan. British Columbia lost a similar number of those workers back in the early 2000s in one of the iterations of the softwood lumber dispute. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.

As I say, this is an ongoing problem. The softwood lumber dispute is just one of the problems the forest industry faces now. For the last year, mills had been doing fine just because prices were ridiculously high, but those prices have come back to earth and now things are hurting again.

It is disappointing, but we have to ensure we put all our minds toward this. I really do think we need to have a long-term solution. In 1982, my kids were not even born and they now have kids of their own. We have to come up with a different way of looking at this.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Madam Chair, 1982 is the year I was born, so this has obviously been languishing for a while.

I had the opportunity to be a parliamentary assistant for a member of Parliament who was named one of the first green architects in Canada and who advocated for green architecture and the use of high-quality wood in buildings, including federal buildings. I was able to work on this project from 2006 to 2011, and that project is languishing as well.

Could the member tell us why this issue has been languishing for so long? Is it because Canada has not been able to build credibility on this issue with the United States? Again, this issue is very important for Quebec, which is why it is so important that the government sign good international agreements.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Madam Chair, it has been dragging on because it works for the United States. It works for this group of protectionist business people, especially those who own many mills. They have found out that this works. If they get Congress to put illegal and unfair tariffs on Canadian lumber, Canada will fight back.

Several years ago, we had a similar debate in the House. I remember counting how many times we had won and it was something like 24 battles in a row, but it takes time. In the early 2000s, as I said, while those court battles were dragging on in NAFTA panels and the WTO, many mills across the country, certainly in British Columbia, went out of business. I think that is what those American interests were looking for, so they are not afraid of trying it again.

[Eric Melillo, Conservative, Kenora, ON]

Madam Chair, I appreciate the comments of the member for South Okanagan—West Kootenay on how this has impacted his region and his province. I know he did not have a lot of time in the debate tonight and I want to give him the opportunity to add any points he may have missed, because it is such an important discussion. I want to ensure he is able to get his points across.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Madam Chair, the part that I glossed over at the end, because I was running out of time, is that we really have to look at a different way of managing our forests. For instance, in British Columbia, every fall we burn all the slash that is produced. All the wood that is not used is burned. It produces as much carbon in the atmosphere as all the cars in British Columbia put together. We could change forestry quite easily so that sector could help us meet our climate targets, but we could also value forests for other things. We could monetize the carbon sequestration. We have seen the floods in British Columbia—

[The Assistant Deputy Chair (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

Now the time really is up.

Resuming debate.

The member for Jonquière has around five minutes for his speech.

[Mario Simard, Bloc, Jonquière, QC]

Madam Chair, I will be frank. In the House, I often hear the phrase “team Canada” and the idea that we should should be working as team Canada. I am not particularly interested in team Canada, and I will tell you why.

Canada has two main economic sectors: the oil industry and the automotive industry. The federal government is totally absent when it comes to softwood lumber.

Today we have heard about negotiating international treaties and about our relationship with the United States. That is one of the problems, but there has never been any serious negotiating, and I have some simple proof of that.

Quebec once again had some issues with the federal government during CUSMA negotiations because the aluminum industry was not protected. Canada's chief negotiator appeared before the Standing Committee on Natural Resources and I asked him a question about the forestry industry. He replied that the forestry industry was not a priority for him at that time.

In 2006, I heard a bunch of people bragging about a deal that had been signed. However, if we talk to people in the industry about that, they are furious because, in 2006, they lost $1 billion. It was a sellout deal. That is one of the problems in the forestry sector. We are too dependent on the United States and, unfortunately, we do not have a government that is prepared to do economic battle with the United States, which means that the sector is left out. That has been proven tonight, over and over again.

The other big issue is the secondary and tertiary processing sector. There are some federal programs to support it. We have the notorious IFIT, for example, a program that aims to transform the forestry industry. As we all know, we no longer consume as much paper, and the pulp and paper industry needs to pivot somehow. Year after year, there are more applications to IFIT than the program can provide in capital. People in the sector have come to me and said that they no longer even bother applying to IFIT because they know they will be turned down.

The funding power that the federal government is putting into supporting the transformation of the sector is pitiful. Anyone in the sector can tell us that.

There is another program that supports softwood lumber exports. Quebec is the largest player in Canada's forestry sector, yet 80% of the budget is earmarked for British Columbia. Members will understand why talk of Team Canada leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Here is another basic fact. As we know, many sawmills in Quebec are coming to the end of their useful life. Given today's labour shortage, sawmills that are not automated are unable to survive. If these people applied for help from Canada Economic Development, they would get nothing. Why?

It is because Canada Economic Development refers them to Global Affairs Canada, which would tell them that it unfortunately cannot support them because that would go against international trade treaties.

Once again, this activity sector is receiving absolutely nothing from the federal government. To add insult to injury, the forestry sector is probably the most promising sector when it comes to tackling climate change.

The investment in the forestry industry in Quebec is just $71 million a year. However, 75% of that is provided in the form of loans, which means that around $17 million is actually invested in the forestry industry.

My region of Saguenay—Lac‑Saint‑Jean brings in $81 million a year for the federal government. What is even more insulting is that year after year, the oil and gas industry is given around $14 billion. That is something to be pissed off about, as my father would say.

[The Assistant Deputy Chair, Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

It being 11:18 p.m., pursuant to Standing Order 53(1), the committee will now rise.

(Government Business No. 2 reported)

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Liberal, Alexandra Mendes]

The House stands adjourned until tomorrow at 10 a.m. pursuant to Standing Order 24(1).

(The House adjourned at 11:18 p.m.)