Thank you very much, Ken.
First of all, with respect to the forestry round table, for one thing the timing of it is because it's forestry week. We thought that's a great opportunity. There will be a lot of the folks who are going to be in town for forestry. In fact, the next day is forestry day on the Hill. So logistically it's a lot easier for some of the invitees.
I'll be honest; I wasn't aware that someone had said you couldn't see the list of invitees, but let me tell you about some of the people who have been invited. Not to mention all of you around the table, there is FPInnovations, which is a leading public–private research institution; the Forest Products Association of Canada....
By the way, we've consulted with both of those agencies, who vastly represent a large section of the industry, and have said: we've done some work and we think an afternoon is what we should need; bring some people together, as well as union leaders—some of the stakeholders such as those. We're looking for a good discussion around this event.
You say you wanted the Prime Minister to lead it. No one should challenge this Prime Minister's commitment on forestry, nobody. He's the one—and we'll get to that in your second question—who put $1 billion into the community development trust. He's the one who, in our first budget out of the gate, had $400 million for forestry. We hadn't seen those kinds of commitments by the previous government, in all fairness, to forestry.
So we have put in significant funds. We worked with the industry to ensure that this money was flowing through to agencies to look at innovation, at new market opportunities, and there was our commitment on the pine beetle.
We work as a government. In all fairness, Mr. Boshcoff, your party is standing up in the House of Commons saying the Prime Minister is a one-man show. Now you're coming here and saying, “How come you're involved? You're just the minister responsible for forests. Why don't we get the Prime Minister?”
We work as a team. We really do work as a team, our entire cabinet, just as I work as a team with my deputy minister. We talk daily. We are all focusing our eye on the ball, on getting the job done, and you can rest assured that the Prime Minister will pay very close attention to this forestry round table.
Your second question was why give it to the provinces? We recognize that some of the most difficult part involves the communities that are being affected by the downturn of the forest sector. Some of the challenges are unprecedented. The forest industry was never geared to being competitive at a par dollar. U.S. housing starts are off by 25%; that's where 80% to 85% of our market goes.
So how do we help those communities? Who's best to deliver initiatives to help the workers themselves?
Just let me finish, Ken. I'm giving you a straight answer.
It's the provinces. Why would we in Ottawa want to deliver programs to these communities? We gave that money to the provinces with a focus to help these communities in the downturn of these sectors in the economy, and in fact we think they're in a far better position to deliver these programs than we are here from Ottawa.