Thank you.
Just to clarify and correct the record, when I said something earlier I misspoke. I said that we import about 100 billion dollars' worth of imports from China a year. What I meant to say is that Canada-China two-way trade is about $100 billion a year. We export about $30 billion and we import just over $50 billion a year, I believe, so two-way trade is approaching $100 billion a year. Nevertheless, we import a lot from China. I think the fact that only one shipment has been blocked is a concern, but I take officials at their word when they say they're working diligently to operationalize the measures that were announced last year in January.
I have another question about cotton imports. As we know, there are complex global supply chains and it's often difficult to determine the provenance of cotton. I know that the U.S. government has been working on a tool to provide to its customs and border agents that will allow those agents to trace the provenance of cotton by using pollen tracing. Apparently pollen from cotton provides a unique genetic signature that accurately identifies where the cotton came from.
It seems to me that with world-leading universities here in Canada such as the University of Saskatchewan and the University of Guelph, where some of this similar research has been taking place, the Canadian government could be collaborating with Canadian researchers to develop tools for CBSA officials to help trace imports such as cotton from Xinjiang. I know there is a researcher, for example, at the University of Guelph who was quoted and interviewed by The Guardian newspaper over a year ago, I believe, who had expressed some frustration that Canadian governments and organizations weren't utilizing some of the tools he had created for tracking the provenance of fish, which is often mislabelled on supermarket shelves. He had been more successful going abroad and getting governments to use his tools than he had here in Canada.
Are officials in the Government of Canada looking at providing CBSA with new tools to help track the provenance of things like cotton being imported to Canada, like the U.S. government has done and like some Canadian researchers are working on?