It's a very important question. We absolutely have given consideration to it.
It's an incredibly complex area. For example, what would be considered excessive government intervention to set prices or essentially manipulate currencies? Specifically, would the U.S. quantitative easing actions over the last several years qualify? Would the ECB's recent actions to essentially go into negative interest rate territory be considered excessive manipulation?
This is a question on which we will need the guidance of experts at Finance Canada and the Bank of Canada to look back at our own monetary policy, set some possible tests or conditions that you might see in an FTA, and actually run the numbers to see whether Canada itself over the last say 20 years in the history of our modern-day monetary policy would have been caught by any screen. Then we have to ask ourselves if we're ready to police this, who would police it, and what any enforcement mechanism would be.
I agree with you that it's an important and very complex question. I would recommend this committee seek advice from Finance Canada on that issue.