Thank you very much. Yes, we would note that the conclusions of the CAW study were diametrically opposed not only to our study but to the study that was carried out by Professor Van Biesebroeck.
I will say that our economists have had a chance to take a look at it and have identified quite a large number of methodological weaknesses with the study that was carried out by the CAW. I'll just mention a few.
The CAW assessment excluded agriculture. It's the sector where we would expect to see some of the greatest gains in an FTA, so obviously this skews the results.
The CAW assessment assumes, in effect, that Canada isn't trading with anybody else; that every dollar in increased imports from Korea necessarily comes at the expense of Canadian production. Well, we know that isn't so. In fact, in the automobile sector in particular, where three-quarters of the domestic market is from imports, one would expect that incremental imports from Korea would largely displace other imports, not domestic production. But that whole aspect was not covered in the CAW study.
Getting to the very high job loss figures they got to, which captured all the headlines, was not based on an analysis of Canada-Korea trade at all; it was basically an extrapolation of the total change in our trade with all of the countries with whom we've had FTAs since the beginning of those FTAs, and that number was grafted on to our current trade with Korea. This assumes there are no factors involving the increase of trade other than the FTA—growth in the economy, currency changes, terms of trade, technological improvements, and so forth.
So, for example, our imports from Chile, with whom we have an FTA, are up significantly, but more than half of that is because of the rise in the price of copper. Well, in their analysis, that immediately gets grafted on to a presumed increase in imports from Korea.
I could go on. The whole premise, though, is based on an essentially mercantilist view of the world, where exports are good and imports are bad, and that's not a perspective I think we would share. What most economists would say is that the economic efficiency gains that should arise from an FTA are the result of increased exports and imports.