International Trade committee  Thank you.

International Trade committee  Absolutely. I'm going to answer two different things. You talked about how a lot of the funding comes out of the provinces and the territories. The buy America ties back to federal funding, whether it flows through a state or through the municipal level. They put in that overriding thing.

International Trade committee  Absolutely, and like I said, there are these windows of opportunity to come in and make some little side agreements or agreements that affect it. Buy America goes back decades, but to not address that and to say that Mexico and Canada are exempt from any of these clauses, that to me seems....

International Trade committee  —that's it.

International Trade committee  You can hear my frustration a bit because of that.

International Trade committee  From my perspective, from what's happened in the past, free trade agreements struck between different countries have always left openings, and those openings are taken advantage of time and time again to—as in the case of the dairy farmers—hit different sectors with some little clause that makes it difficult for them to truly have free trade.

International Trade committee  I agree with your first statement when you say that we Canadians tend to be too nice and we open our doors so that everything can come in. I sit as the chairman of the American Concrete Pressure Pipe Association, and I'm also the chairman of the Canadian Concrete Pipe & Precast Association.

International Trade committee  I've talked myself hoarse at the municipal level. I've gone in front of numerous councils and said, “Just give us fairness.” That's all we're asking for. We're not asking to be protectionist. We're asking them to react and to react quickly when things are put in place that restrict our trade.

International Trade committee  That's correct.

International Trade committee  I probably would agree with that, but unfortunately the engineering that we provide we restrict to our own products, so we're not exporting engineering services. Our services are internal. We are a registered consulting engineering firm, but we limit it to our own products.

International Trade committee  Well, the funding is fantastic. I'm going to make a protectionist kind of statement now. It's Canadian tax dollars that are paying for Canadian infrastructure. It would be nice to see Canadian companies have a fair shake at obtaining that work. When Canadian companies are kind of handcuffed to go to other countries, and those countries are allowed to come in and take those infrastructure dollars, which I am happy to say that I participate in supplying through the taxes that I pay, I get a little upset.

International Trade committee  It's 3,000 indirectly.

International Trade committee  My issues with the free trade agreement are really with the side things that happen. If it were purely free trade, we would probably benefit. We would benefit if you could say that our doors are open to the U.S. participation and the U.S. is wide open to Canadian participation. If that were truly the case, then we would probably benefit because we have a state-of-the-art facility and we consider ourselves one of the best producers in the world and we think we can be cost-competitive and certainly competitive in our marketplaces.

International Trade committee  Typically, we get approached by a constructor or a large engineering firm asking us if we would provide a quotation into a particular job. I would say, for 99% of the jobs we've been asked to quote in the U.S., at the end of the day our bid wasn't taken, simply because they couldn't verify whether they could accept the product because of the uncertainty put out there by these policies that exist in the U.S.

International Trade committee  Buy America. Buy American.