Let me talk about running rules for a minute. There's the vision of what they should be, if you had to have them what they would be, and what you think you have.
It was the expectation in Ontario for the longest time that if you were going to cut a deal, if you were going to get a deal, it would not be very much dissimilar to some of the previous deals where there has been allocation of a border measure as a quota.
You're a company. You're assigned a quota on the basis of something--export experience, percentage of volume, production--and that's your quota. You may be constrained that within every 90 days you have to ship a certain volume and you can't go more or less than 5%, you can't accumulate, and you can't roll over. My colleague Monsieur Chevrette talks about the same things and the discipline that companies have had. Even small and medium-sized companies can deal with that.
The running rules as we know them now are adjustments monthly, surge mechanisms, certain percentages you can carry forward. Some you can carry backwards, but you can't add them up, and these can't be subtracted. What happens during the end of a period of time? I'm being ludicrous and hilarious to the point that they are so difficult to understand because they're not written down anywhere. Running rules are invisible. They're not well known. Everything you think as you answer the question speculates something else. You say,“Well, what if...?”
My suggestion is that if you have to leave 10% or 15% of your ability to ship on the table in any month, in any quarter, in any period of time, that's far more than the margin your firm makes. So the running rules themselves will finish you, let alone every other thing. But complying with just the running rules alone can finish you.
But $450 million to the White House is an allegation that has been suggested. I'm happy to be party to it, because being able to speculate that it might be true may raise the attention of people to say, where is this $450 million designed to go? What are meritorious initiatives? Let's have a little look at this. What's the list of the merit?
The vision of the industry at the one time when we were talking about a deal was to improve the market for forest products within North America. We were prepared to put money into that initiative, and we in fact--the Canadians--were prepared to take the lion's share, the first largest percentage of it. All we needed was the concurrence of the United States and a mechanism.
Thank you for your time.