I'm Susan Senecal. I have the honour of chairing the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association, along with my colleague Garth Whyte, who is the president and CEO.
Good afternoon, everyone.
We want to give you the Canadian restaurant perspective on CETA. Thank you very much for the opportunity to present this afternoon.
The Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association, which I will call CRFA for simplicity, represents a $65-billion industry. We spend $23 billion on food and beverage purchases every year. To give you some notion of it, that's over $900 million in poultry, as well as $2.7 billion in dairy. These are considerably large purchases. We have 30,000 members, and that includes chain restaurants, independent restaurants, chefs, and so on. We employ 1.1 million Canadians, and a further 300,000 indirectly. Many of those jobs, in fact the majority of them, are in the agricultural sector.
We are here today to discuss the CETA. We understand that once confirmed this trade agreement will eliminate thousands of tariffs, encourage foreign investment, promote movement of labour, and, in short, give Canada unprecedented access to the $17-trillion EU economy. That sounds like good news. But with the detailed negotiations still under way for the next couple of years, it's hard to say at the moment how all of the details of the agreement will affect the restaurant industry, its benefits, or potentially any issues that may arise with the implementation.
At the very least, we can certainly speculate that the CETA will allow Canadian restaurateurs to offer our guests a greater range of European food products, some for the first time, which should generate interest and build on the impact we have on the economy. I can also say without any hesitation that CRFA is in favour of allowing market forces to drive what food products and what prices are available on the market. We believe in customer demand; we live with it every day.
Until recently, market forces were maybe not as visible, but certainly today with the advancement of technology and the prevalence of free trade agreements, tariff walls and protected domestic markets are relics of a bygone age. This is a global environment. Nations are focusing their economic efforts on sectors where they have natural competitive advantage. We see that as a continuing economic trend that will be good for all economies.
In our agriculture business, 90%—over 210,000 farmers—already operate without protection of tariffs walls and earn their living through open global competition, with great results, either in exporting their products or selling domestically. Judging by their considerable export success, European sales of Canadian agricultural products, such as grains and canola, should quickly develop further once the tariffs are removed.
Other than the CETA, of course, Canada is exploring other trade deals, notably with the Pacific Rim countries. We see these nations also offering great opportunity, with a growing middle class and rising disposable incomes. That's all driving rapid inclusion of higher protein sources in the diet, such as meat. Unfortunately, as we see from the charts I have enclosed in the presentation, Canada's exports have not been keeping up with the rising global demand, and that's an impact of supply management. In regard to our supply management system, we expect the impact of the CETA to be felt most in our agricultural sector.
I'm going to turn things over to Garth to continue with our opening remarks.