Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good morning. My name is Alain Beaudoin and it is my pleasure to be here today to talk to you about the Security and Prosperity Partnership for North America.
I am the Director General of the Innovation Partnerships Branch at Industry Canada. One of my responsibilities is to coordinate the prosperity agenda for the government.
Before proceeding, I would like to say that I appeared before the Standing Committee on International Trade on May 10 to speak about the Security and Prosperity Partnership for North America. The remarks I am going to make today are essentially the same as those I made to that committee. I believe you have a copy of my remarks, for reference.
First, I will give a little background, because I do not want to repeat what my colleague Mr. Haddow has said. The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, the SPP, was launched in March of 2005 as a trilateral mechanism to strengthen North American competitiveness and enhance the security and quality of life of the citizens of the United States, Canada and Mexico through greater cooperation and information sharing.
In Canada, the Minister of Foreign Affairs has the mandate to manage our North American relationship, of which the SPP is one component. The Minister of Public Safety leads on the security agenda, and the Minister of Industry is responsible for the prosperity agenda.
While respecting the sovereignty and unique heritage, culture and laws of each country, the prosperity agenda of the SPP seeks to enhance the competitive position of North American industries in the global marketplace. It also aims to provide greater economic opportunities, while maintaining high standards of health and safety. To this end, the United States, Mexico and Canada work together with stakeholders to strengthen competitiveness, reduce the cost of trade and enhance the quality of life.
Because of its trilateral nature, the SPP is a complex mechanism. It is implemented through the activities of the trilateral working groups that are responsible for outreach with a variety of stakeholders within each country. The prosperity agenda is composed of nine trilateral working groups in key sectors of economic activity: e-commerce and information and communication technologies; energy; environment; financial services; food and agriculture; health; manufactured goods and sectoral and regional competitiveness; movement of goods; and finally, transportation.
With input from stakeholders, working groups have agreed to work on a number of bilateral and trilateral initiatives to advance the prosperity agenda. All these initiatives have been made public. If you have not already done so, I invite you to look at the SPP website. It provides detailed work plans and documents the progress achieved so far in implementing these initiatives. Briefly, this is how the SPP works. Now the question is how Canada can benefit from it.
As you know, key factors have fundamentally challenged the way global firms, including Canadian businesses, operate. Low-cost telecommunication systems and transportation and the availability of low-wage skilled workers in other parts of the world continue to profoundly transform business activities into global supply chains. There are advantages to this transformation. Even small and medium-sized businesses that use supply chain integration and technology can expect significant cost reductions in quality and time to market, but North American businesses are feeling intense pressure to remain competitive. While Canada is one of the most prosperous countries in the world, our prosperity depends in large part on our ability to access international markets. To remain prosperous, it is essential that Canadian businesses adapt accordingly and be able to deal with issues of supply chain management, such as seamless logistics. For Canada, these issues culminate at our border with the U.S.
It is common knowledge that nearly $2 billion is traded each day between Canada and the U.S. Our economies are highly integrated and increasingly work in a seamless fashion. About 34% of our bilateral trade is intra-firm, and over 77% is intra-industry. This has led to the emergence of integrated and globally competitive commercial platforms fundamentally rooted in North America.
This is where the SPP can be instrumental. The SPP aims to enhance and encourage continued prosperous trade between North American countries while ensuring security. The SPP is but one part of Canada's positive and productive relationship with the governments of the United States and Mexico. The SPP is a non-binding partnership. It seeks to find practical solutions to concrete issues. It is one mechanism to ensure a strong relationship with our NAFTA partners and is not intended to duplicate or replicate existing mechanisms. As such, the SPP is not intended as a replacement for NAFTA, nor is it intended to serve as an alternative to existing trade negotiation mechanisms.
At their last meeting in March 2006, the three leaders of Canada, the United States, and Mexico agreed to focus on five priorities to advance the SPP and ensure tangible results. The five priorities are strengthening competitiveness, emergency management coordination, cooperation on avian and human pandemic influenza planning, energy security, and ensuring smart secure borders.
This renewed focus reaffirmed the leaders' commitment to advance a positive agenda for North America.
Achieving regulatory alignment within North America is one of the most important contributions to strengthening competitiveness. Through enhanced cooperation under the SPP, Canada, the U.S. and Mexico seek to make their regulations more compatible to reduce costs, by eliminating duplication and redundancies, and minimize barriers to trade. This is being achieved while ensuring continued high standards for health and safety, and protecting our environment.
The leaders also agreed to create the North American Competitiveness Council, to provide governments with advice and recommendations on ways to improve competitiveness.
To build on this agenda, on February 23, Ministers Bernier, Day and MacKay met with their American and Mexican counterparts here in Ottawa. They reviewed progress on the five priorities in advance of this year's leaders' summit, currently scheduled for August 2007.
Ministers also received the report of the North American Competitiveness Council, which was released publicly. This report made 51 recommendations in three areas: border-crossing facilitation, standards and regulatory cooperation, and energy integration.
In conclusion, the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America has been conceived as a step-by-step, practical approach to improve the way governments work together to enhance competitiveness, ensure our security and quality of life. All of this takes time and continued commitment.
Thank you.