Thank you.
Let me try to address your three questions. First of all, on the raw log exports, you're correct. This is Minister Emerson's responsibility, but I have had discussions with him, as well as with my other colleagues. James Lunney has raised this with me a number of times, with equal concern.
There are issues. We have to be careful we don't trigger any kind of trade action within the softwood lumber agreement. That is one of the mitigating factors.
We've had discussions with the province. I know on the softwood lumber agreement there were opportunities for discussions dealing with this issue, but again, Minister Emerson has the lead.
I should say that one of the things we're trying to do within the forest industry.... And you've talked about your mills closing. We recognize the difficulty this is placing, especially on some of these small-industry towns right across Canada, the one-industry towns. That's why the Prime Minister announced $1 billion in the Community Development Trust, so that there could be some money going out to help these communities, to help these families, and to help these workers, not to mention the money we're investing in forestry innovation and in looking for new markets.
We're committed to doing that. We're working with FPInnovations and the Forest Products Association of Canada to continue, and we absolutely believe that the forest sector is an important part of our economy and will continue to be for some time to come.
But I take note of your concerns on the raw logs. There are different people with different schools of thought. The province is engaged in this as well. So again, I know people are looking to see if there are things that can be done. There is no silver bullet, though. Just thinking that if you stopped the shipment of logs, those mills would come back tomorrow.... In fact, all of those mills on Vancouver Island have access to every single log first, before one log goes south of the border. Any Canadian mill is going to have access to those logs before they're exported. That's an important note to make.
On the ecoENERGY program, the reason we asked the homeowner to pay their audits was that we wanted their buy-in. What we found from the previous program was that the homeowner didn't have to pay for the audits, so a lot of people were just getting audits but then not doing any of the work. We felt that by having the homeowner at least pay for the audits we could actually increase the amount of the grant, which we've done. The average grant is just around $1,000 across Canada; there will be some that are less and some that are more. But we believe the program is working, and it has great participation.
I don't know the specifics with respect to the ecoAUTO program, only that we've put a significant amount of money in the budget looking at our auto sector for innovation, looking at how we can work with the industry. We have a great auto manufacturing sector in Canada. They've been world-class in building automobiles and manufacturing some of the best in the world. We know the auto sector is having a tougher time. For SUVs and pick-up trucks, the market has virtually collapsed in the United States, so the auto sector is definitely looking for other opportunities. They're all engaging in more efficient vehicles, which is great, and our government is trying to work with them to ensure that happens.
On the ecoAUTO program, though, we felt it was better to move money into doing that kind of work with the auto sector in the development of more fuel-efficient vehicles, and that's why we decided to make that change.