Thank you very much, sir.
It is always very difficult to conduct negotiations on a single topic when there is only one party asking. Around the same time last year, when we approached the United States to “solve” the Buy American problem, Canada was clearly the underdog. The United States did not need us. They had nothing to ask from us, except, obviously, they remembered very clearly that they had not succeeded in making us swallow the exemption in the 1990s. They took their old files out and demanded that we make the offer that we should have made in 1994, if we wanted to obtain anything from Buy American. We had not made the offer because, in 1994, there was nothing in it for us. There is still nothing in it for us. Canadian SMEs will have no access to those markets because they have been reserved for the American companies for almost 30 years.
Could we have made a breakthrough in the negotiations, as we did last year and at the beginning of this year? I personally do not think so.