International Trade committee  In terms of the automotive provisions, they have set up a bilateral automotive council, U.S.-Korea, and, as has been mentioned, what's called a snap-back provision. So if, through this expedited dispute settlement mechanism, they determine that the Koreans are not moving quickly enough to open their domestic market, they can put the tariff back to the previous rate, what's called the MFN rate.

International Trade committee  I haven't modelled the impacts.

International Trade committee  Thank you for the questions. I think you have put your finger on a very important issue, this unbalanced and unhealthy relationship, from the Canadian point of view, where we have relatively low job and value-added content to our main exports, and the Koreans have a very high value-added and job content to theirs.

International Trade committee  I'm not an expert on the details. I would just simply reiterate that Korea has a history of a very active industrial policy, and even after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, they adopted a very deliberate export-led growth strategy and very successfully pulled themselves up by the bootstraps.

International Trade committee  Thank you for those excellent questions. On the intellectual property rights issue, this is something very much under the radar and it has not been getting nearly enough attention in the deal. This is a serious break from Canadian past practice. We have not negotiated TRIPS-plus provisions in our bilaterals.

International Trade committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Both members have raised some very important points. I think the data on trade, particularly in automotive, with the 153:1 ratio, speaks to the extreme difficulty in selling cars into the Korean market. I am not certain that a trade agreement can actually address societal barriers.

International Trade committee  Now that we've cleared up the background noise, which I was also hearing, what I had begun to say was that I can certainly vouch for the importance of and the increasing interchange between Koreans and Canadians. My nephew is about to marry a young Korean woman this Christmas. Today, however, I think we have to focus our attention on the deal that is actually on the table.

International Trade committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the committee for the invitation. Thank you to my fellow presenters. I can certainly vouch for the importance of--

International Trade committee  No, I haven't seen an enormous change. My understanding is that the mandate has not changed, and I don't know if that's because Canada hasn't gotten to it or they've endorsed the position of the former government in a serious way.

International Trade committee  To address the issue of the adequacy of the governmental authority exclusion in the GATS, article I(3)(c), I don't believe—and this view is shared by many—that this is an effective exemption. It's certainly not a full exemption for public services. It states that services provided in the exercise of governmental authority are excluded from the treaty, but it goes on to further define that as services that are provided neither on a commercial nor a competitive basis, nor in competition with one or more service suppliers.

International Trade committee  A short comment on that. It's always possible the trade promotion authority or fast track could be extended, but I think in the current political climate in the United States that is not very likely, and I don't believe anyone will want to negotiate seriously with the United States if the President does not have trade promotion or fast track authority.

International Trade committee  Yes, there is a paper and some material I will pass to the clerk. In 1995, and later in an addendum to the GATS in 1997, Canada covered a whole range of financial services, including insurance. In the case of auto insurance, they took a country-specific exemption--it's called a limitation--for the existing public auto insurance systems, in four provinces, I think.

International Trade committee  That qualifier, that the government will not make commitments in public education, concerns me, because commitments covering private education would certainly affect the public system. Educational providers such as universities offer training courses in competition with private providers, so commitments covering private education would certainly have implications for public providers in the public system.

International Trade committee  Just in response to that, I think it's very clear that the United States, and particularly the Europeans, have linked movement in agriculture to movement in NAMA and services. In fact, the Europeans have called for a meeting on services exclusively by a core group of ministers to occur before more ministers come at the end of June.

International Trade committee  I don't agree that we would have chaos. The WTO treaties would still be in effect. The dispute settlement system would continue to work. There's a sense of the bicycle theory, that you have to keep ever expanding trade treaty rules, that if the bicycle stops, it will fall over.