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.