International Trade committee  The Atlantic fisheries, for example, stand potentially to gain from lower tariffs in that area. Now that's an area where tariffs are actually quite high, but if you look at most of the other areas of the Canadian economy, you know Canada-EU trade, the tariffs are quite low. I thi

International Trade committee  No, I don't think there is any reason. I don't think there's a good reason to include investor-state arbitration in CETA. I'm not convinced, nor are many groups or lawyers who have looked at this text, which is available publicly now on certain websites, that it addresses the iss

International Trade committee  I do. In fact, the federal government shares that concern as well. We saw that in the financial services negotiations as part of the CETA talks. They clearly didn't want to allow investor-state challenges to be directed at financial measures here in Canada. They expressly said th

International Trade committee  It's the largest economy in the world—

International Trade committee  —I know that.

International Trade committee  To be fair, we have access to that market. It's not a closed market. There are very few trade barriers to doing business with Europe. We do 10% of our trade with the European Union. That's the highest amount after the United States. There are almost no problems with respect to do

International Trade committee  It's in the $200-billion range.

International Trade committee  I have comments on a couple of things you mentioned. First, on the municipal side of things, I agree. I've seen those FCM statements. But I would argue that the verdict is still out on whether all of the conditions have been met, specifically that fourth condition around the sp

International Trade committee  There will still be thresholds for the projects that will be covered. I think the European Union and its corporations that were pushing hard for these procurement rules in the deal would argue that this will be beneficial for them. In fact, in the summaries of the deal that's bee

International Trade committee  We're not concerned so much about this kind of ability to compete. I think Canadian companies do have that ability to compete. I think when you take away all these options from cities, though, on big projects, they have been successful at creating jobs. I think the defence procur

International Trade committee  Well, of course we support trade. In fact, most Canadians obviously support trade. It shows in the polling data. Eighty per cent of Canadians like the idea of a trade deal with Europe. We're no different. We don't support the types of agreements that Canada typically pursues, th

International Trade committee  Of course not, because they are all based on the NAFTA model, which we continue to oppose for some of the reasons we laid out today. We think they give far too much power to corporations, that they have not been as good for the general public as we are told frequently that they w

International Trade committee  Yes. This is another concern we have around the coverage of services in the agreement, coverage of municipal services in particular. We've seen investor-to-state lawsuits in Europe related to re-municipalization, in this case it was health services. They haven't carved that out o

International Trade committee  We were part of briefings that took place after the first of the nine negotiating rounds. These were briefing sessions held with many different groups, academics, and NGOs. We felt that they were mostly one-way communications. Of course there was an opportunity to ask questions,

International Trade committee  No, we didn't.