Our position on that has been that we need to have a debate about it. We know we have free trade requirements around the world, and we are big advocates of encouraging free trade. However, there have been a number of instances where Canadian firms feel like they are being shut out because of the low-cost component of a lot of the contracts that are coming forward by international bidders.
There's one great story of a member of ours who does promotional products and used to provide what tended to be very small contracts to a variety of government departments. He had a contract--I think it was at Agriculture Canada--where they actually had to have a bag that had Canada logos all over it. He'd been doing this contract for a number of years; he lost it recently to a Canadian company, but it was being manufactured in China. He was manufacturing in Canada. Basically, as part of that, in the final product that he eventually saw, they were told they could take out the “Made in China” logo in the bag. It was supposed to be a Canadian product, but ultimately it was manufactured in China.
So he felt a little bit.... The fact is it was actually made in China, but Agriculture Canada was allowed to take that labelling off and have the product look like it was made in Canada, even though it was actually made by a Canadian company that had it manufactured in China.
Those are the types of struggles that our members are facing. They feel they're creating jobs, and keeping jobs, in Canada and paying taxes in Canada, and they feel sometimes they are competing with these companies that are perhaps in other countries, and the company leaves the country.
Our position, as I said, is that I think we need to have a debate about that. We're not necessarily advocating either way, but it is something that comes up from our membership every once in a while. But we also understand the need to make sure that we provide opportunities for our businesses in other countries as well, so we don't want to necessarily shut that opportunity off either.