Many observers of the industry will say that if we are able to negotiate free trade agreements with foreign countries, we should be able to have a single economic space in Canada. This is why more than 20 years ago the agreement on internal trade was negotiated. In recent years there have been joint efforts, actually at the call of provincial premiers, to have a significant revamping of the agreement on internal trade. The effort is now known as the Canadian free trade agreement.
Negotiations are very advanced in that regard. It has the ambitious goal to significantly increase the mobility of goods, services, and people across the country. Actually, the agriculture and fisheries committee of the Senate did a study on interprovincial trade and heard from many witnesses.
The witnesses who appeared often referred to measures with respect to the movement of alcoholic beverages across provincial borders, differences in terms of standards for certain types of products, such as dairy, which is one area, or differences in meat, for example. There, as my colleague Mr. Mayers was mentioning, while the movement across provincial borders is federal, you often have smaller slaughterhouses that are regulated under their provincial regime because they sell within the province. However, in an area like Ottawa-Gatineau, where you have small slaughterhouses or meat processing plants on both sides of the border, if there's an interest in selling just across the river, legally you have to be a federally inspected plant to do that, and the requirements of CFIA are different from those of MAPAQ in Quebec or the OMAFRA in Ontario.
These are examples of measures that provinces and the Canadian government are trying to work out under the Canadian free trade agreement.