Mr. Chair, it is getting late and I would like to apologize.
I want to start by thanking many colleagues who have been in the take-note debate tonight. I am only participating virtually because I am simultaneously in the committee doing clause-by-clause on Bill C-12. Timing is tricky, and I know that I have only five minutes. I want to start by saying that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Courtenay—Alberni.
Many of the speeches tonight have been extremely powerful. I have been trying to observe them all, as we can imagine, back and forth between Zoom rooms while defending amendments to protect refugee rights. I want to say from the outset that the forest products industry is terribly important to Canada, and that, as a British Columbian, I grieve for every mill town that has lost its mill, for workers who have no wood to process.
As some members have mentioned already, the hon. member for Jonquière, for example, the forest industry is facing a perfect storm, and it is imperfect in its impact on the communities.
It is horrific. A lot of the impacts have been climate change-related, with insect infestations, the pine beetle outbreak in B.C. and wildfires, which have contributed to a hard time for supply and a hard time for forest workers.
I have been working on forest policy issues for a long time. I wrote my first book on Canada's forest policies in 1998 and the second in 2005. Through all of it, one persistent irritant has been the U.S.'s constant raising of objections to the structuring of our forest industry, unfair objections that claim we are subsidizing our forest industry. What I would like to suggest in my time tonight is that, as the U.S. is once again doing this, we need to think outside the box. We have been trying, for decades, to fix the softwood lumber disputes with the United States. Let us think about protecting our industry through new approaches to economic sovereignty.
Again, referencing the hon. member for Jonquière, I think it was a solid idea to think about paying some of the duties so that we protect the industry. I would also like to suggest that it has been more than decades, centuries, since we have thought of ourselves as hewers of wood and drawers of water, having a rip-and-ship mentality to how we handle our natural resources. What if we said no more to allowing a pellet industry to start selling pellets to Japan and the U.K. out of good, solid logs, as proven in research by Ben Parfitt from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives? What if we said no more to this fake carbon credit to the U.K. in taking Canadian logs and turning them into pellets to ship them overseas? No raw logs should leave this province or the country without being processed first.
I also want to suggest, in the time that I have, that it is time Canada created a strategic reserve of Canadian softwood lumber that the government buys. At this point, it is not as much as it used to be. There is $11 billion to $15 billion a year of Canadian softwood that ends up in the U.S. We could keep it here, process it here and use it to build Canadian homes. We could have structural lumber that creates greener building materials. We could continue to hold our softwood lumber here, use it here and process it here. Even one raw log exported is one raw log too many.
We could engage indigenous nations to work with us to ensure the sustainable management and the logging of our old growth and do more to ensure that every log harvested in Canada is processed in Canada. We could get those logs to sawmills and use them in Canada where we need them. Let Trump apply tariffs if he wants to, but we will not be shipping them any forest products anymore until they stop their practices that are prejudicial, illegal and unfair to Canadian forest-based communities.
I would urge the House to listen to all those strong voices and also thank every member in this place who spoke of the pain and suffering that forest communities are experiencing as mills close and tariffs increase. This is an urgent priority, just as important as aluminum and steel, and every member of the current government needs to recognize that.