“hypocritical blather about free trade”

“It's better to let the talks collapse and send the big guns home empty-handed than to be fooled again by Europe's hypocritical blather about free trade when clearly its countries, led by France, believe in free trade only when it suits their narrow interests.”

- Editorial, NYT’s, 11/11/05.

“...the trade dispute adjudication panel was so overwhelmingly in favour of Canada's position — that Washington was imposing illegal duties on Canadian softwood lumber...”

- Jeff Sallot, Globe and Mail, 11/05/05.

“...a NAFTA panel of trade adjudicators has ruled five times -- most recently Oct. 5 -- that the United States's calculation of part of its softwood duties was illegal under U.S. law and it has five times urged Washington to bring its results into line... A well-placed source on the Canadian side of the dispute estimated that U.S. softwood producers are earning an additional $150-million a month because of inflated lumber prices caused by the dispute.”

- Steve Chase, Globe and Mail, 10/29/05.

“Prime Minister Paul Martin made a direct pitch to Chinese President Hu Jintao over the weekend to sell more Canadian softwood to China in an effort to lessen Canada's reliance on the contentious U.S. market.”

- Daniel LeBlanc and Peter Kennedy, Globe and Mail, 09/19/05.

“Surely, we all reasoned, the United States would respect the law... The Prime Minister asked the President of the United States directly, in a telephone call just last week, to respect the law... The President expressly declined. He told the Prime Minister what his new emissary, Ambassador Wilkins, has been telling Canadians all summer: the United States will not settle this dispute according to NAFTA. It will not abide by the law. Canada must negotiate...American demands for change are born of disappointment when changes do not produce the results sought by the competing U.S. industry, results that would make Canadians less competitive... The United States may never accept the rule of law, may never accept legal defeat, and may never permit free trade in softwood lumber... There is in the United States Congress growing anger over free trade... American foreign and commercial policy has never featured compromise... Deal-making with the United States is an exercise in trading off uncompromised positions according to different priorities, not a process of resolving disagreements through compromise one item at a time... the U.S. industry wants less Canadian lumber, at higher prices, in the U.S. market... The Senate Finance Committee controls the agenda. It is populated now, as it has always been, by Senators from states with a lot of trees, the consequence of a tax system that benefits the large landholdings that great forests typify... Senators keen to protect the tax advantages of thier states find thier way onto that Committee, whether it is Robert Packwood or Oregon, ...or Max Baucus of Montana, ... Can he [Bush] really sell more trade deals around the world when the world is being told he does not abide by them?... Now the question is really ‘How do we get the U.S. off our backs?’... The historical record of international trade or economic relations is not encouraging, to say the least. The European Union used it successfully two years ago to force the U.S. to abandon steel safeguards found illegal by the WTO... the dispute is no longer just a softwood dispute, but a dispute about NAFTA... We do not realistically expect the United States to do what the law requires -- acknowledge that Canada again has proven that there is no subsidy, stop collecting our money and give back what is rightfully ours... what we have spent on legal fees is a small fraction of the 5 billion dollars we have had to disperse with U.S. Customs in order to keep exporting to the U.S. since May 2002... Canadian companies are facing financial hardship, and industry associations have asked the government to provide loan guarantees... a powerful signal to the U.S. Government that Canada will not allow it to starve us into submission... the United States will never cease to remind us of its own strength and our relative weakness...”

- Carl Grenier, Exec. Vice-President and General Manager, Free Trade Lumber Council, “Softwood Lumber and the Future of NAFTA,” Presentation, Economic Club of Toronto, 10/19/05 (See http://www.ftlc.org/index.cfm?Section=2&DownloadID=104).