Obviously, this is an important issue for us and for you as we work through things with the new administration and where NAFTA may go.
I have a couple of really specific examples, and maybe I'll give one on business professionals crossing the border. There are defined rules within NAFTA and within the trade relationship with the U.S., even within subagreements that Canada and the U.S. have on the movement of people and goods, that are aimed at facilitation. These go back, primarily, post 9/11 when a bunch of different agreements were put in place.
A really good example of one that we've never been able to get our head around and that doesn't really work that well is the movement of business professionals going back and forth. The specific example that I'll give will be around service and repair professionals.
As a pure Canadian example, machinery or equipment will often be bought from a U.S. supplier. As part of the agreement they will bring in people to install it, and then there will be a long-term service relationship to maintain that equipment. If something breaks down, the repair person needs to come into Canada because they're very often very specialized and trained only on one piece of equipment and they bring in the parts that come with it.
Under NAFTA rules and agreements with the U.S., those people should be able to enter Canada without any problem whatsoever. However, depending on the day that person crosses the border and which border crossing they might be crossing at, and which person might be asking them questions when they get to the border, they're often stopped and held for hours at a time and denied entry.
It's that type of problem. It's the uncertainty that comes with crossing the border. The excuse typically is that they're taking jobs away from Canadians. What ends up happening is that when that person can't get into the country to repair something, Canadians are losing jobs. It's that kind of thing.
We've also heard of a tit-for-tat type of problem, in which the U.S. is starting to increase its enforcement, asking for things like T4 slips when someone is crossing the border to prove that they're employed by a Canadian company. That requirement is not written anywhere, but a border guard decided that day to ask for these. The Canadians will reciprocate the next day when coming back. It's that kind of stuff that drives businesses crazy and really undermines the competitiveness of our intertwined economy. That's my example on that very specific issue.
On regulations, the RCC between Canada and the U.S. was a great step forward for us. The deal that was signed in 2011 was hugely supported by industry and, generally speaking, across governments, and we support it. It was really good in a lot of ways, but it also is weak in a lot of ways, because you're still relying on regulators to agree that their regulations should be merged with someone else's regulations. What ends up happening is that the two countries still regulate in tandem with one another. Sometimes they share data, and in some sectors like automotive, they've made really big leaps forward in areas like vehicle emissions, for example. In other areas there haven't been, so Canada will still regulate and make one small change over here without thinking much of it, and it will undermine the ability of a company to make one product and sell it in both markets.
What we think and mentioned here today and certainly mentioned before the trade committee is that we need to be looking beyond that, looking at something like a mutual recognition agreement of regulations. Then you're not relying anymore on regulators to come to agreement on what's aligned, but the political side of things can say that we trust each other's regulatory systems. We're going to allow each other to regulate. Canada can still regulate and the U.S. can still regulate, but we're going to accept U.S. regulations as domestic regulations, so you don't end up getting into these situations where products are banned from Canada simply because a regulator has a bad day one day. That is is happening today.
A lot of it comes back to the need for business certainty and to remove uncertainty as much as possible from the processes in regulatory approvals.