The short answer, Mr. Lemieux, is no, we have not compromised supply management, nor do we ever intend to. We see it as a valuable part of our agricultural system and actually a very valuable asset to Canadian consumers. When you look at some of the problems that have been had in those supply managed goods around the rest of the world, we haven't had that in Canada, simply because our supply managed families have had the wherewithal, a good solid bottom line, to put in the biosecurity and the food safety right from the farm gate on through. They've done a tremendous job, and they're leading the world actually with traceability and the ability to have that biosecurity in place through to the processors.
We've got a number of major world-class processors moving to Canada to take advantage of our dairy. Danone yoghurt in Quebec is another one now looking at Ontario, doing a test run, simply to make use of the quality consistency of our milk. So we look at that as a real bonus.
I know there are a lot of folks...and I laugh at or with my good friend Garth Whyte at the restaurant association, always complaining about the cost of milk. But at the same time, he doesn't compare a restaurant meal in Canada to a restaurant meal in the U.S. There is quite a discrepancy there too. I'll be happy to point that out to him the next time I sit down with him.
On the TPP, the changes, what drew us in, of course, was more the change that Japan was interested than the U.S. We already have good open trade with the U.S., called NAFTA, and of course we're WTO partners as well, but with Japan now thinking in terms of the TPP, it's a lot more interesting to us to add countries like that into a free trade group. Certainly we'd work with it bilaterally too should it decide the TPP is not to its liking. It's exploring it, as are we.
The aggressiveness that is required to join the TPP has been blunted to a certain extent. As I said to Mr. Allen, the U.S. has some areas that it is defensive on; so does Japan, and for that matter Australia, which is a good solid trading partner, but there are times that even it doesn't honour science and its trade rules. It is still holding our beef out, after 2003.
So there is a lot of work to be done all over the world. I would say that we as a government would not have had the success we do without industry coming along with us. This is a complete team that descends on a country, and we don't leave until we get a good amount of movement on what we're doing.
The Market Access Secretariat has been the quarterback for a lot of that. Fred Gorrell and his team have just done a tremendous service. Then you look at the great work done by embassies around the world—for example, David Mulroney in China. I could just go on and on about the great work our embassies do. We now have a CFIA scientist on the ground in Beijing and another one in Moscow, where we've had some problems on certificates and so on. We actually have personnel now dedicated to Ag Canada and to CFIA right in those major trading spots, and that's helped a lot.
