Madam Chair, 42 years at the negotiating table is a long time. If I were the government, I would not be patting myself on the back or blaming another political party. Certainly, we know the Conservatives' approach did not work. Like I said earlier, it is taxing the axe, because their motto was tax from both sides of the border, which they agreed to. It was a billion-dollar hit to the B.C. lumber industry and producers in British Columbia, and half a billion of that went to lobbyists. That is what Stephen Harper negotiated.
The Liberals dragged this out. There has not been a full-court press on the issue. Clearly they have not negotiated well, and we need a different approach. We need to keep as much of our fibre as we can in Canada. We need to supply our mills. We need to end raw log exports. We need to add value to our fibre. We need to retool our mills. We need to invest heavily into ensuring that we keep up with the international market and are supplying the needs of countries that do not have access to fibre, as well as with emerging markets, where there is huge opportunity. There is mass timber, which we talked about.
We have seen some great models in British Columbia of small players that cannot access fibre. This is ridiculous. The federal government allows international trade and export of our fibre, and our local mills cannot get access. This is just absolutely bonkers. I cannot think of any country in the first world that is managing its forest sector like this. It is unbelievable.
The opportunity is here. It is right now. I hope next week, in the budget, that the federal government is going to take a different approach and is going to look at mass timber, value-added product, retooling and putting more money on the table. Catalyst mill in my riding received the most federal money ever in the history of the riding to retool the mill so we can make food-grade paper and replace plastic paper. When one goes to Costco and gets a hot dog, the packaging is from my riding. Eight times the value per tonne is what we are getting now because of that retooling. Let us do more of that.