International Trade committee  That will be in place on day one that the agreement comes into place.

International Trade committee  I'm not sure that any other markets would be affected. The EU has its own distinctive requirements for entry into the EU of these products. That doesn't have any bearing on what other countries might decide to impose in terms of requirements. With the EU, during the negotiations we made a significant amount of progress in reducing those barriers.

International Trade committee  Those have already been formally accepted and are in place.

International Trade committee  No, there hasn't been that kind of extensive analysis conducted since then. I'll just mention, though, since you mentioned that analysis, that the analysis assumed a number of factors that could mean we would see even greater benefits. For example, they assumed that the Doha negotiations under the World Trade Organization had been completed.

International Trade committee  That analysis still remains current. We would both see increases in exports of goods, both from the EU side and from the Canadian side, and services as well. On the services side, the market is quite a bit more underperforming than it is on the goods side, so there's more scope for growth on that side.

International Trade committee  We'll be importing a broad range of services in which the EU has particular expertise. We have looked at everything from certain dredging services.... They have the capacity to have much larger types of equipment that they can provide and use in the Canadian market. There are water treatment processes, in some cases.

International Trade committee  That remains to be determined by the EU. At the moment, we certainly would anticipate that it has to go through the steps at the EU level, including approval by the Council of the EU and the European Parliament. It may then possibly have to go to member states as well. After the agreement is approved by the European Parliament, the EU will pursue something called “provisional application”, which would allow them to put in place probably 95% of the agreement.

International Trade committee  No, I don't think there is much of a risk. We have had some concerns expressed about CETA, largely because of the U.S. negotiations. Those were largely coming from Germany and France. Germany and France have since said they're fully on board. I've visited the majority of the EU member states over the past couple of years, and there's strong support in all of the member states.

International Trade committee  I wouldn't characterize it as a common practice, but it's certainly not unprecedented, particularly in the EU, because of the various challenges they have in making sure that 28 member states are staying on board. They have tended to negotiate issues even after negotiations have been finalized.

International Trade committee  This is something that has been a long-standing part of the Canadian position. We have it in our agreements that we should protect governments' right to regulate. In our discussions with the EU, we strengthened that further by putting it in the preamble to the agreement, which already asserted the right to regulate, and also putting it into the investment chapter itself.

International Trade committee  We haven't established a set date, but we have indicated that we would do that as quickly as possible, particularly once the agreement comes into force. As I mentioned earlier, this is the first time that there's ever been an appellate body in investor state dispute resolution processes, so we want to make sure that we design it in a way that's going to function well and make sure that it does what it's intended to do.

International Trade committee  That short list you provided represented some of our primary objectives in the negotiations. When it came to environmental services, engineering services, mining services, and construction services, Canadian service providers have an advantage in many of those areas. Those are areas we highlighted as priorities.

International Trade committee  Fisheries was something we spent a lot of time on because it was a key objective both in the eastern part of our country and in the western part, and particularly in B.C. As it stands now, the EU has tariffs on about 95% of that—sorry, it's not quite that high, but we're going to have elimination immediately on 95% of their tariffs, and 100% after the phase-in period.

International Trade committee  We see huge opportunities in that regard. Actually, I think the Netherlands is the second-largest investor in Canada after the United States, and that's only one EU member state, so there's a lot of potential for further growth in investment. Also, we've already been hearing anecdotally that EU investors from different member states are starting to look a lot more closely at the Canadian market, and that includes British Columbia because of a variety of benefits that are offered there.

International Trade committee  On forestry, we've done a number of things. We've established a committee with the EU to address some of the technical barriers that still exist between us. We have protected our regime with respect to log exports, although we have undertaken to provide the EU with the same access that anyone else might get in terms of our log exports.