Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 52, I request an emergency debate on the impact on the forest industry and its workers, but also on consumers, of the recent decision by the U.S. government to raise anti-dumping and countervailing duties on Canadian softwood lumber.

On Thursday, February 1, 2024, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced plans to substantially increase the countervailing and anti-dumping duties it levies on Canadian softwood lumber. If the United States government maintains its preliminary assessment, the duties would almost double from 8.05% to 13.86% starting in August.

The software lumber dispute is a bad serial and the episodes have dragged on for decades. As their cash is being siphoned off by the United States, our forestry companies find themselves unable to modernize and slowly decline. The U.S. is causing considerable harm to our resource-rich regions, where hundreds of communities rely on the forest.

Despite losing all its cases before the various trade dispute settlement bodies, the U.S. continues to maintain hostilities. The traditional approach, where the government issues a press release to express disappointment and challenges U.S. decisions before trade tribunals, is not working because the U.S. is acting in bad faith on this issue. This is particularly true in Quebec, where stumpage rights are awarded in open auctions using a mechanism quite similar to what our neighbours do south of the border.

An emergency debate in which parliamentarians would have the opportunity to express their support for the affected populations and, above all, to propose innovative solutions, could make an essential contribution and allow us to resolve the impasse to which we were led by the U.S. government's stubbornness. The current context and the scale of the announced tariff increase call for an urgent debate; hence my request for such a debate, which I hope the Chair will convene at the earliest opportunity.

Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay

$476,406.00