Thank you. That's a very good question.
When we initiate trade negotiations on a free trade agreement, it's standard now to conduct extensive consultations with industry stakeholders. We seek their views in terms of the issues that we should address in the negotiations.
It goes without saying that there are issues that we're addressing, such as non-discrimination in tariff treatment, as well as trying to reproduce and build on the existing disciplines that are of interest to non-tariff measures, such as disciplines on technical barriers to trade or sanitary and phytosanitary measures.
However, often when we negotiate with a country.... I will take the example of the Canada-European Union comprehensive economic and trade agreement. In the lead-up to developing our negotiating positions, we consulted extensively with the industry. Several of the stakeholders—for example, the beef and pork sector—identified that regulatory approvals of certain techniques such as washing techniques for beef carcasses were an important element for them to have addressed as much as possible in the negotiations. We have tried to do that.
There are a number of things, typically, in a trade agreement. What we codify is rules of general application. We're reproducing, for example, what we have with the WTO in terms of disciplines on technical barriers to trade or sanitary and phytosanitary measures. We have also negotiated, in the context of this agreement with the European Union, side letters that allowed us to especially insert political commitments towards the resolution of a number of these issues. For example, included in these side letters there are two carcass-washing techniques that were resolved to the satisfaction of the sector.
That said, when you talk about regulatory measures, there can always be, despite the trade agreements, new measures that constantly come into effect. That's why we can use the trade agreements as an anchor point to have a productive dialogue between regulatory agencies—for example, between the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and their European counterpart—to try to build on the trade agreement in trying to resolve these emerging issues.
I will end my answer by also noting that you mentioned a list, which I think refers to our market access support system. It identifies roughly 300 market access issues that exist. Not all these market access issues are necessarily non-tariff measures. In some cases, a sector is identifying that it would like to have an equivalency arrangement between Canada and a given country in terms of standards, or it would like to have an import certificate that is prepared. These are slightly different from non-tariff measures, but they are issues that have been identified by the sector. Of that 300, it's not necessarily all of these 300 that are non-tariff measures.