No interface with government is required if, for example, a Canadian company would like to source ready-made garments in Bangladesh. However, we like to think that the advice we offer in our missions abroad is so useful—and it's also so low cost because it's free—that it's a really good idea for companies to talk to our offices, whether it's the development program or the political program or the trade program of the embassy.
We regularly survey Canadian companies, who tell us that our advice has been extremely useful for them in revealing things they didn't even know about the market and that prevented them from making expensive mistakes, or mistakes that could have had a significant negative impact on their reputation because they were unaware of issues. I'll use the Bangladesh example. This is a relatively recent lesson that many Canadian companies have learned. You can check, say, the labour practices of your supplier, and that's good, but you also need to check whether the supplier is using a building that's not going to collapse. Fire safety is another example.
These are things that you are not going to think about if you're doing business with Germany, but become issues that you need to be aware of if you're doing business in a market like Bangladesh. One of the functions of our missions abroad for those Canadian businesses that choose to speak to us is that we alert them to those issues that might otherwise be invisible to them.