International Trade committee  I can certainly address the one on the Wheat Board. We get average prices from the Wheat Board. We have to amalgamate our different qualities of grain into one class. We face the same--

International Trade committee  What we get is an average of the market transactions, but they don't give us the detail on any individual transaction.

International Trade committee  It depends. In terms of merchandise trade, we have a cost-recovery program, but we also try to make a vast amount of data available for free. For instance, all of what we call the HS6, which is the harmonized commodity code data, is available for free on the Industry Canada's Strategis website.

International Trade committee  Let me deal with the volume question first. One of the reasons we do price indices is so we can convert the monetary trade flows from a current dollar to a constant dollar basis, where we're then trying to get at what would be a proxy for volume in terms of a constant dollar series.

International Trade committee  You're talking merchandise trade?

International Trade committee  As you aptly alluded to, in the province of clearance, where the goods are landed.... After that, we don't track where they go in the country. There's a project in the national accounts where they try to measure interprovincial trade flows, but it's detached from that administrative data source.

International Trade committee  Generally, there's a—

International Trade committee  There are UN guidelines on the compilation of trade statistics, and internationally they are followed pretty much universally. Trade data sources are generally administrative data. The one exception might be within the European Union. For the intra-European Union trade data, because they've gotten rid of the borders, they're now relying on their value-added tax.

International Trade committee  I think the concerns I've articulated today really are shared around the world in terms of the quality issues. There are papers that have been written in the United States and there was a book in the 1950s that addressed these issues. They're internationally recognized there. We all struggle with them.

International Trade committee  There is the International Merchandise Trade Statistics: Compilers Manual, which we all try to follow, but there are different trade systems as well that can be applied. In Canada, we follow what's called the general trade system, which means that our customs boundary basically agrees with our physical border.

International Trade committee  To go to the question in terms of whether we should rethink trade data and the way we do it, the administrative data we get from Customs is by far the best data we're going to get. In the early 1990s, for international merchandise trade, we had a project actually called the alternate data sources project.

International Trade committee  We just keep trying to encourage and educate the exporters and really work with them to convince them that this is important.

International Trade committee  In theory, it should be identical. This is the same transaction we're talking about.

International Trade committee  We do reconcile. We've done a number of reconciliations with Mexico, and I think we understand some of the differences that are there. The flip side is that we aren't going to be able to change the monthly trade statistics to reflect those differences on an ongoing basis.

International Trade committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Today I'm going to divide my time with my colleague from the balance of payments division. We're going to give you a very brief overview of trade statistics and the balance of payments. What I'm going to do is talk about merchandise trade statistics. I'm going to tell you a bit about what we do and how we do it.