Madam Chair, I will manage to finish this debate, I promise.
I do not share the enthusiasm of my colleague from Trois-Rivières and my friend the parliamentary secretary.
As for the announcements made on August 5 regarding the $700 million in access to liquidity and the $500 million earmarked for improving production chains, unfortunately I am hearing on the ground that the $700 million will be used up by March. There will be nothing left for access to liquidity. However, I would remind members that this $700 million is intended to compensate for the $10 billion that is currently being held captive in the United States.
I also found out today that the people affected by the closure in Saint‑Michel‑des‑Saints do not have access to the $700 million for administrative reasons that escape me. They do not have access to it. The 150 employees in Saint‑Michel‑des‑Saints who are unemployed because of the mill closure will remain unemployed. Between August 5 and the time things started moving in late October, early November, I feel like it took a very long time before action was taken.
It is also important to point out that Building Canada Homes can be part of the solution, but we will never be able to replace the entire American market. I take no pleasure in saying that. People in the forestry sector say that we will never be able to completely replace the American market. We need to accept that. If we want to achieve that, the forestry sector will have to undergo a major transformation, and that is not going to happen in five or six months, or even in two or three years. It will take 10 to 15 years. What we need during that 10-to-15-year period is concrete action.
As I said, we want to talk about concrete measures this evening. I would like to share a few suggestions with my colleagues right now. I will come back to payments for countervailing duties at the end of my speech.
We could implement a program modelled on the Canada emergency business account, which we used during the COVID‑19 pandemic, by offering interest-free loans that are conditionally repayable, in part, to self-employed workers and forestry subcontractors. That is important. When I talk about subcontractors and self-employed workers, it is important to realize that the forestry sector is an industry with people whose job profiles are very different. Liquidity programs are very little help to subcontractors and the self-employed. However, if the government sets up a program similar to the emergency account, it could help those people.
The government could set up a wage subsidy program to enable laid-off workers to keep their jobs. What we want to do with the people who are in limbo because of sawmill closures, such as in Saint‑Michel‑des‑Saints, is to keep them working so that they do not disappear into other sectors, and we do not end up with weakened industries once the construction crisis in the United States is over.
As part of the renegotiation of CUSMA, we need to ensure that the dispute mechanism is better structured in order to prevent the American stalling tactics that we are currently seeing. The Americans always lose at international trade tribunals. However, since the United States plays dirty, it is continuing the dispute.
The allegations made by the American lobby only involve wood from public forests, so we are asking for an exemption for wood from private forests. It has long been known that the Americans claim that Canada's forestry sector is being illegally subsidized with very low stumpage fees, which is no longer the case. However, the special status of private forests, which are in another sector, is never recognized.
We must ensure recognition for Quebec's forestry system, which operates on an auction model and complies with free trade requirements. We must create an industrial development strategy focused on increased resource processing and on research to develop new products. The government may be working on this, but it will take time, as I said earlier.
This brings me to what I consider to be the key measure. I want to explain it properly, because I was a bit rushed earlier. Where does the real problem with countervailing duties come from? It comes from the fact that 45% of all money in forestry transactions is held captive. We could recover that 45% if the government agreed to pay 50% of the anti-dumping countervailing duties at the end of each month.
If that were to happen, we would save jobs and support the forestry sector. The government would be guaranteed repayment once the dispute is resolved.
It would not cost anything, no one would pay for it and we would save one of Quebec's leading economic sectors.