Thank you very much for that excellent question. It's one that we've had to grapple with following the adoption in Europe of the Lisbon Treaty, because the treaty created a number of new institutions in the European Union and also various roles for new players within the EU structures.
From a Canadian perspective, we have to remain engaged with both Brussels and the EU leaders and institutions as well as with, essentially, every member state of the 27 as and when required. We've seen this necessity on various different issues. If the European Union is moving forward on an issue under its own competence, our colleagues from our embassy in Brussels, who are accredited to the European Union, will take the lead on ensuring that Canada's position on a particular file is well understood and well articulated at the EU level, and by coordinating both with our headquarters and with our other colleagues stationed in EU member states, they will ensure that Canada's position is also properly articulated to the member states. We found that you can't approach it from one way or the other, but that you must approach it as both a member state and at an institutional level.
Canada was actually one of the first countries to have a foreign EU summit with EU leaders after the Lisbon Treaty. That was the first opportunity, in May of 2010 in Brussels, for the Prime Minister to sit down with both the president of the European Commission, Mr. Barroso, and the new president of the European Council, Mr. Van Rompuy, to begin relationship-building at that stage. It was also an opportunity, from the vantage point of parliamentarians, to meet for the first time with the president of the European Parliament and to begin engaging in dialogue at that level.
We continue that at the officials level, of course, and as Alex has mentioned, the EU itself now has its new External Action Service, which is their newly formed foreign ministry, and the head of that service is Lady Ashton. That is the main EU interlocutor for Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, but that in no way negates the need for our minister to be in very close contact with member state ministers on an issue-by-issue basis.