It does indeed get fairly warm, and as you will appreciate, I'm not one of the colder ones at the table. Sometimes I get pretty upset about this.
First, on the question you put to Mr. Rutenberg, I agree with everything he says. As I was joking on the way in, I thought his estimates of the adverse impact on the American consumer are, if anything, too low. Looking at it top down instead of building it bottom up, it has to be at least a $15 billion U.S. hit for the American consumer, $10 billion of which has already been pocketed by the U.S. industry through higher prices, and then they hope to get another chunk of the deposits in cash to add to it. I'm heartened to hear him say he thinks it's actually higher, that it could be $25 billion.
I think that's lousy U.S. public policy, and if I were testifying before a congressional committee—which I won't be, but if I were—I would say to them they were headed down a very wrong track. But that's where Mr. Rutenberg should be instead of here--and he's done it, and his team has done it, and they're not calling the shots. When I sat down at that negotiating table last year or in earlier years, I couldn't feel the home builders' presence there. I could certainly feel the coalition's presence there.
On the precedent issue, I would just reiterate what I said before: that horse has left the barn. We won all the cases back in 1996 and we had to settle because the Americans refused to return the money. Despite the fact that a strong legal case could be made that they were under the legal obligation to return the money, they claimed they couldn't without an agreement that was acceptable to them—an agreement that was to the serious disadvantage of the U.S. consumer, but that for the Canadian producer was in fact a pretty attractive deal.
When you talk about the size of the ransom, again it's sort of Santa Anna; you have to remember the history here. I obviously am not prepared to discuss what went on while I was at the negotiating table last year, but I can tell you it's a matter of public record. But in 2003, many governments ago, very serious consideration was given to an agreement in principle that was going to split the deposits not 80-20, but 52-48. It was a smaller volume of deposits, but that was looking at basically splitting the kitty in half. This agreement—as I say, I have to hold my nose to support it—is a bit easier to support at 80% than at 50%, and with the U.S. industry not getting 48%, but instead getting half of the remaining billion dollars.
This is not theology; this is not Utopia; this is a very difficult trade situation in which you're dealing with an extremely powerful U.S. political lobby. As Mr. Rutenberg will attest, he has more members, but I suspect this industry is putting more money into presidential campaigns, and I know they can get more signatures on a senatorial letter to the President on 24 hours' notice than anybody else I've ever seen. So it's a very powerful industry, and it is dictating the U.S. position on this.