44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 1, 2021 02:00PM
- Dec/1/21 9:45:19 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Chair, I want to say that six years ago it was this member to whom I asked my first question in the House of Commons the first time I spoke, so it has come a bit full circle.
I would ask him this. To get away from this dependence on the United States, is there anything more we could be doing to expand our markets, both here and abroad, as well as to value or monetize our forests in ways other than just for fibre and two-by-fours?
90 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Dec/1/21 10:28:56 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Chair, in response to a question, my colleague referenced why we need to use CUSMA, NAFTA and whatever mechanisms we can. She also said that CUSMA was negotiated in a normal way. Well, why was softwood lumber not included in it? To me it seems that this is such an intractable problem that logic and fairness have nothing to do with it.
What are we up against here and how are we going to get around this? We could have put it in CUSMA if logic and fairness had something to do with this dispute.
96 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Dec/1/21 10:51:45 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Chair, I would like to thank my colleague from Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies for his speech. I was on the natural resources committee with him as well, like the other member who just spoke.
The member talked about the mills that have moved south. We now have big companies in British Columbia that own sawmills. They have more mills in the United States than they have in Canada. Does the member know of a trade legal way whereby we can take the tariffs that have already been charged to those companies and have the government return that funding to them in the form of loans, as a kind of down payment on what the government is promising about solving this problem?
126 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Dec/1/21 11:03:19 p.m.
- Watch
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.
748 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Dec/1/21 11:09:07 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Chair, this is an important debate. The forestry industry in Canada is hugely important. We have heard of the forest workers who are affected. In British Columbia, we hear a lot about energy and oil workers losing their jobs in Alberta and Saskatchewan. British Columbia lost a similar number of those workers back in the early 2000s in one of the iterations of the softwood lumber dispute. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs.
As I say, this is an ongoing problem. The softwood lumber dispute is just one of the problems the forest industry faces now. For the last year, mills had been doing fine just because prices were ridiculously high, but those prices have come back to earth and now things are hurting again.
It is disappointing, but we have to ensure we put all our minds toward this. I really do think we need to have a long-term solution. In 1982, my kids were not even born and they now have kids of their own. We have to come up with a different way of looking at this.
184 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Dec/1/21 11:11:19 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Chair, it has been dragging on because it works for the United States. It works for this group of protectionist business people, especially those who own many mills. They have found out that this works. If they get Congress to put illegal and unfair tariffs on Canadian lumber, Canada will fight back.
Several years ago, we had a similar debate in the House. I remember counting how many times we had won and it was something like 24 battles in a row, but it takes time. In the early 2000s, as I said, while those court battles were dragging on in NAFTA panels and the WTO, many mills across the country, certainly in British Columbia, went out of business. I think that is what those American interests were looking for, so they are not afraid of trying it again.
140 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- Dec/1/21 11:13:02 p.m.
- Watch
Madam Chair, the part that I glossed over at the end, because I was running out of time, is that we really have to look at a different way of managing our forests. For instance, in British Columbia, every fall we burn all the slash that is produced. All the wood that is not used is burned. It produces as much carbon in the atmosphere as all the cars in British Columbia put together. We could change forestry quite easily so that sector could help us meet our climate targets, but we could also value forests for other things. We could monetize the carbon sequestration. We have seen the floods in British Columbia—
114 words
All Topics
- Hear!
- Rabble!
- add
- star_border
- share
- menumenu
- notificationsnotifications
- home
- mailmail
- searchsearch
