Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Welcome to our witnesses.
A number of points have been brought up. I'm going to try to drill down a little deeper into a couple of them. One of the problems I have with your testimony, Mr. Neil, is this. I would like to stick to our agreement with Jordan. We've had pretty good cooperation from the official opposition and from the Liberals to bring this to committee, and hopefully get it through the House, and in a cooperative nature I think we can move forward with Canada and Jordan working together.
I don't think any of us on this committee are under any illusions that there's some kind of a perfect world out there, or even everything that all governments do, including our own, is 100% correct. But if you don't proceed with trade and some type of a rules-based arrangement, then you don't have anything to work with.
So we're looking here at the basis of this agreement for Canadian companies that are already trading with Jordan. It's not as if we're not trading with Jordan today; we're going to put clear guidelines and rules in place.
I want to go back to the labour cooperation agreement, and I'll ask both of you to answer this.
Right now we have no labour cooperation agreement. We've signed one, but it has not been legislated. It has not gone through the Parliament of Canada. So the labour cooperation agreement is as basic as this: the right to the freedom of association, the right to collective bargaining, the abolition of child labour, the elimination of forced or compulsory labour, and the elimination of discrimination with respect to employment and occupation. We're not dealing with huge issues here. We're dealing with the basics that help to instill respect for humanity and respect for labour and build on that with a country that only has an emerging labour policy, if you will. How can that, under rules-based trading, be a bad thing for Jordan?