Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would also like to thank the committee members for inviting me. It's good to be here again. It's been over three years since we last appeared before this committee.
It was also a pleasure to hear Canada West Foundation's work referenced during the committee. I would like to thank the committee members who brought that to our attention and also the witnesses who mentioned our work.
Today, you're well familiar with Canada West's work. We publish the only brief on western Canada's relations with the Indo-Pacific and with China. We've also done analysis of the Indo-Pacific strategy and convened a summit of prairie trade ministers to discuss a strategy.
I would like to switch the focus today and talk about a comparative analysis of the strategy, based on my previous experience as executive director of Canada's Latin America think tank during the time of the implementation of the Americas strategy. Had I realized that the minister responsible for the strategy was going to be in the room, I might have prepared a bit. I'll take my life into my hands and try to make some comments regardless.
I'm not going to talk about LNG. The government has already been excoriated on that by previous witnesses, so that frees me to take a bit of a different tack.
On the Americas strategy, think about this as a foreign ministry official back at headquarters in their country or capital, or think about it as an officer assigned to Canada from a foreign country to follow the Indo-Pacific strategy. One of their first steps to understand and analyze the current strategy would be to look at Canada's previous attempts to have a framework. I would take this tack and pull out three things from the history of the Americas strategy that may be helpful in your study and your recommendations, hopefully, and two or three observations for things to consider as you formulate recommendations.
The first difference between the Americas strategy and the Indo-Pacific strategy is the time frame. You've heard Ambassador McKay and ADM Epp describe the strategy as a generational response to a generational challenge. This is language that we didn't hear with the Americas strategy and we don't traditionally hear in Canadian foreign policy. I'll tell you, from talking with foreign officials and with think tanks in the region, that this statement really got people's attention. The time frame difference was a huge signal.
The second signal was the resources that were set aside. Putting aside serious money was very important.
The third thing that the strategy did was talk about the inevitability of China. I'll spend a couple of seconds on this aspect.
The Americas strategy was in some ways seen as optional for Canada, but China is not optional. India is not optional. What I mean is that it's not because they're our second-largest trade partner; that is not the point of China's inevitability. You've heard other witnesses say that China is the world's second-largest economy. It's the leading trade partner with 120 countries, not just in the Indo-Pacific, but with Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Peru and Panama. In our own hemisphere, if you're trading, you're going to run into China.
China spent a trillion dollars building infrastructure that receives and moves our goods when we ship them abroad. We struggle to build trade infrastructure. Ever since the Asia-Pacific gateway, which was a highlight for Canada, and the highest point of our trade infrastructure rankings, we've struggled. China is responsible for the infrastructure on the other side that moves our goods, so even if you tried to run away from China, you're going to run into China, and you're probably going to be doing so on roads built by China.
The last point is capacity. Under the Americas strategy, there was not much money for new capacity for Canadians, not just for business, but for the full range of Canadian stakeholders to be able to engage in the region. With the Indo-Pacific strategy, we have those investments: not just trade commissioners and not just an academic centre, but money to bring the full range of Canadian actors up to speed. Again, if you're going to run into China, even if you try to run away, you need to have the full range of Canadian actors that will run into China better prepared. We tend to bring up expertise from the U.S. to do this, and I think the Indo-Pacific strategy can correct that. We need our own expertise, our own analysis and our own experts analyzing from Canadian perspectives.
The last point is on the North American trade negotiations. We had the Americans scaring us away from engaging China at the very same moment that the Americans were negotiating their own trade agreement with China, one that positioned them to take market share and money away from western Canadian producers.
With the Americans, we co-operate on security and intelligence, but if there's money on the table, we need to have the ability to defend our own interests with them, and that is certainly the case on China. We've seen it in the past, and with India we may be seeing the same thing.
I'll leave it there and welcome your questions. I hope that was helpful.