Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Louis‑Frédéric Lebel and I am the president and chief executive officer of Groupe Lebel.

We are a family business that has been in the lumber industry for over 60 years, primarily in the lower St. Lawrence region in eastern Quebec. We also operate processing plants in Ontario, New Brunswick and Maine. We employ approximately 1,200 people in Canada and we are one of the 15 largest lumber producers in North America.

Our family of mills includes two located on the Quebec-United States border. The logs that supply those plants come mainly from the United States and reach us via forest roads created for that purpose. These two sawmills belong to a group known as the border mills. A number of sawmills of this type, located all along the border, have the same status and mainly supply the United States.

Historically, these sawmills had special status. Through all the disputes we have had with the Americans, that status meant that we did not suffer exactly the same damage as the other companies when we exported to the United States. In other words, we were not necessarily subject to the same tax rates, or our quotas may have been different. Since 2017, unfortunately, our status has not been renewed. We therefore have the same status as the other sawmills and we suffer the same damage as the entire Canadian industry.

Following that logic to its end, we can say that the Americans are taxing their own wood today. What we do is import logs from American forests and process them in Canada, and then when we have to export them to the United States, we have to pay tax. This means that American consumers are paying tax on products that originate in their own country.

Thank you.