[Portoman]

Why doesnt the American government start a legislation where for a company to hire immigrants, aka the mexicans, the employer needs to pay for adequate housing, give them money for food, and give them an equal pay as others in the industry would earn, and not allow the immigrants to collect Employment insurance or welfare. This is what the Canadian government has set out and done, and this is stopping Canadian companies from hiring out to other countries.

Also going back to the Canadian mill topic, our mills, atleast in British Columbia, are strictly just harvesting the wood infested with pine beatle, at the moment. So in turn if we don't actually harvest the wood, the pine beatle which has already taken over alot of bc, would actually spread down into the states. I'm not sure how bad you guys have it down there but its getting pretty bad up here. Since the pine beatle epidemic has started they have stopped harvesting the clean wood and I know of two local mills that have shut down recently because of this and also because of the Canadian dollar doing so good. Don't get me wrong I'm not knocking buying local lumber and such from your own country, but every country has a number of resources that they export. For example Washington state is a big exporter of fruit, which personally I used to own a fruit packaging plant which we had to shut down because the Americans were selling at prices we could not compete with. Now I own a winery, which 60% of all the oak barrels we buy are American oak and the French oak barrels we buy are still made in the states. But with the winery we now aren't competing with the American market with wine, since not many American wineries sell in canada, we now have to worry about Chile, Argentina or Australia. So with every market you have your ups and downs, and there will always be a competing market that can offer some goods at a cheaper rate then local.

Sorry for taking this off topic again. I'm not really sure where I was taking this whole thing, but that was my rant for the day. Good day and Good night.

Mike