To your first question, and your response on that, part of the problem with the way any department throughout the federal government is set up is that there's no capacity to roll over unused funds from year to year. You can draw ahead and so on like that, but there's no annual rollover capability. So if you didn't use all the money this year, you can't just roll it over into the next year and say, “Look what we have” and build to the future. There's a little thing called Treasury Board guidelines, and the Auditor General gets really antsy with that. So that's a bigger question to be addressed, and I certainly don't have any problem making that argument. If it takes legislation to do it, I know I'd have your support to do that.
On the WTO, we are getting down to the final nitpicky details as to what's going to happen and how it's going to happen. At the same time, we're seeing more and more of the countries shifting over to the NAMA, or non-agricultural market access. We've seen countries like Japan, which has been quite vocal on sensitive products and in our camp on some of those issues, now go quiet as we get into the non-agricultural. It is a very industrialized country, and it's looking to protect its auto sector and its turbines and a lot of its technology on that. So it's gone quiet on agriculture to try to keep its powder dry for those final negotiations. It's getting very interesting. I'm getting updates from Steve Verheul, whom you all met, and I think he's doing a fantastic job. He's gotten commendations from Pascal Lamy and from Crawford Falconer, the big boys around the table over there who are driving this or keeping it between the white lines.
I think we're going to see some movement. I'm very concerned when at the same time we're struggling to get WTO agreements, we're seeing the U.S. Congress pass their Farm Bill, which flies in the face of everything we're trying to do over there.
They're saying one thing and doing another. They're in an election cycle, so it's sort of the silly season. We'll have to wait and see what their take is around the table. There's still talk of a ministerial yet this spring. It keeps getting delayed. Crawford Falconer was supposed to have come out with another text. His third was supposed to have come about two or three weeks ago. It's still not out. Now there's talk it may come out next week or the week after that, but, of course, every time he delays, it delays the ministerial or the possibility of one.
If we don't have something nailed down by summer break, it's going to be very problematic trying to reinvent it in any positive way come fall, with the American elections. When you take one of the major players off the table, that's going to be very problematic. We don't want to lose the gains we have at this point, because I think Canada is forging ahead and coming through looking very good and very positive.
The SM5 are there and are briefed every day as to what's happening, what's going on, how we move forward. They are starting to whisper about being constrained by the November motion, that we all honour and we all obey. We may have to see something addressing that before the final result, but I've said it's up to the SM5 to make that call. If they decide that they want to see us move away from that motion of zero-zero-zero, and don't sit at this table, or don't sit at that table, it's their call, because we're going to honour it, the same as you are honouring it, the same as Liberals, the same as the NDP are honouring that motion. But if the SM5, at the end of the day, decides that we should have some changes on that, it will be their call, and of course we'll have to expedite that through the House.