International Trade committee  I think we've still got quite a bit of work to do. The larger companies don't need a lot of help. They either have in-house expertise or they have advisers or brokers who can help them deal with whatever needs to be dealt with. They have all the resources they need to access th

International Trade committee  Absolutely. We have had delegations from member states. Belgium brought the largest business delegation they've ever taken anywhere to Canada last fall, primarily to the west. We've had other delegations coming from Italy and various other member states as well, so they're starti

International Trade committee  Yes, and that's another issue that we discussed at length with the FCM as the process went along. There are a number of provisions within government procurement to deal with that. First of all there would be a discussion or a consultation to see if there was some way to deal wit

International Trade committee  The previous government made commitments on this issue. We have had signals from the current government that they also intend to address this issue. We don't know the specifics as of now, but certainly it would involve working very closely with provinces and territories. Provinc

International Trade committee  We don't anticipate the impact will be that significant, because we didn't go nearly as far as the EU wanted us to go. They have additional patent term protection of about five years, whereas we have agreed to an additional two years under very specific circumstances, with a numb

International Trade committee  Yes, it would.

International Trade committee  I would say that consultations constituted probably the largest part of my job during the negotiations. I spent far more time consulting than I did negotiating. We had a structure for the first time in CETA, given the scale of it, that was even larger than we had for NAFTA 20 y

International Trade committee  First of all, on the issue of whether the British might leave the European Union, I think we are all watching that date of June 23 and what might happen then very closely, because it will have a significant impact on the EU. If the scenario that we wouldn't like to see occurs, t

International Trade committee  It has to be a parallel approach because you simply can't pursue the obligations in the agreement in a domestic court.

International Trade committee  Well, I wouldn't really want to speculate on that. We'll certainly need to keep on top of it. I think we'll probably have to do a bit of an internal review to ensure that everything is going to be on track, because we're anticipating a significant increase in movement and traffic

International Trade committee  The fact that we've included municipalities in the government procurement obligations for the first time has meant that some changes have been made. We had extensive discussions through the negotiations with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. I spoke to them on almost a m

International Trade committee  Yes. In fact, I think that question is close, word for word, to what we have negotiated. This is an example of one of those cases in which Canada came into the negotiations with a desire to protect those types of actions from dispute settlement by investors. The EU came to this r

International Trade committee  I think that's another area where there is significant potential for growth in both directions in many ways. As you mentioned, we are certainly far behind the EU in scale, in terms of greenhouses and the extent to which they utilize them in Europe, in particular in the Netherland

International Trade committee  It is interesting that you mention that, because one piece of analysis that we did was to look at the percentage of citizens of Canada that have come from EU member states or have a heritage from EU member states. I think we came up with a final number that was over 80%. Those l

International Trade committee  It's not really an area of my expertise, but we are expecting increases in traffic under CETA, and the ports in the east will see the greatest increase in this traffic. We do have to make sure that we're prepared to accommodate it and we would very much want that to not become a