Mr. Chair, I would like to congratulate you on your appointment. I have heard great things about your wisdom, and I look forward to working with you.
I will be sharing my time with the member for Windsor West.
This is my first speech since being re-elected, and I want to thank the people of Timmins—James Bay. It is very moving to me that, in the first speech I give, I am speaking about an issue that is impacting our communities. I am thinking of the incredible community of Elk Lake and the mill workers there. The EACOM mill in Timmins has been taken over by Interfor. They are people with an open-door policy and they welcome me to the mill. I have visited with the workers and seen the production lines.
One of the things we learned from the long crisis with softwood lumber is that we lost so many mills in the north, along with the collapse of the paper industry: the loss of Smooth Rock Falls, the loss in Kirkland Lake and the huge loss of the Abitibi mill. However, the mills that survived became very efficient. Just this spring I was talking to representatives from EACOM, who said they were finally having a good year. They were finally starting to reinvest, and then they got hit with this. This is an issue that we have to address.
I am not going to attack my good friends over on the Conservative side, but their sense of history is, I find, a little strange. Yes, Stephen Harper signed a softwood lumber agreement, but he came in and threw out every WTO win that we had. We had won at the WTO time and time again, but then the agreement was that we would take a billion dollars' worth of subsidies that our industry had to pay, which should have come back to us, and give $500 million to competitive mills in the United States. Do members not think those mills thought that was a great idea, and that as soon as the softwood lumber agreement ended, they thought they would hit up Canadian companies for more money? The fact that our industries had to subsidize American competition shows how wrong this is. That is the history of this.
In six years, the current government has not negotiated the softwood agreement, and it has an effect. It has been a ticking time bomb. When the Biden administration came in, we knew it was going to take a hard line on job protection, and I do not hold that against it. I do not hold it against Joe Biden that he is standing up and saying he is going to fight for good union jobs. I have never heard the Prime Minister say that. I wish he would.
What worries me about the Prime Minister is that he is like the last of the Davos free traders. He believes that he and the Deputy Prime Minister can go to Davos and talk about this great international order where all the trading partners make agreements, but that is not what is happening. Around the world, countries are defending their own financial interests, and we have been left out in the cold. We saw it with the inability of our country to make PPE when we were hit with the pandemic, and our inability to make sure our people were safe with no investments in vaccines. Well, Brian Mulroney sold off our vaccine capacity, but the Prime Minister was going to trust in the international market. The Americans were investing in massive amounts of medical research during the pandemic so they would never be in that situation again. We were hoping for the best, and that is what we have been hoping for with softwood. We are hoping for the best, that everything will work out.
The Prime Minister and the Minister of International Trade went to Washington on November 17. This was going to be the big hug. The Prime Minister was going to do the schmooze charm. Seven days later, the Americans hammered us. What did the Prime Minister say that pissed them off so badly that within seven days, they doubled the tariffs on us? I am not sure the trade minister even mentioned softwood. We never heard any talk about it, but within seven days of their being there, we got hammered.
We know how the Americans are going to operate. We know where they stand, and we know how they will bend to their lobbyists and their vested interests in Washington. That is not news to us. The question is what we are going to do to stand up for our industry, our workers, the union jobs we need to defend in forestry and the auto sector, and the massive transformation we need to make in the energy markets. We have not heard that from the Prime Minister.
Now the Liberals are telling us it is complex. “Trust us. Trust us,” they say. The workers in Elk Lake, the workers in Timmins, the workers in Cochrane and the workers in Kapuskasing, in my region, are not going to trust. They want to see action.