I think the motion's extremely reasonable and very fair. First of all, I can clear up a couple of things that Mr. Longfield mentioned. I was in Washington the day the tentative deal was done. I was asked Mr. Easter, for the Canada-U.S. parliamentary association, to be there with Mr. MacDonald as part of a bipartisan group, the Canada delegation for the Border Trade Alliance meetings. It was an interesting time to be there.
The U.S. decided to table its text immediately. It usually has 30 days to table its text, to clean it up, and that's why some of the text had some errors in it, where Mexico and Canada were reversed a bit and so forth, but they did that so they could get into their public discussions, and that's what's going to go before Congress.
That's what's in the process right now, but that's separate and independent from us. Nothing can change in that process for the final deal. They will present reports to Congress and the Senate will look at it too, but nothing can change at all about the deal. The deal is exactly how it's been tabled in the U.S. There can be some amendments to some grammar and so forth, but nothing changes to the substance of it whatsoever.
Even with all the hearings that are happening—you saw most recently the Governor of Kentucky expressing some concern—those are so they get feedback from the public so that Congress members have an understanding when they vote. That's the vetting that they have for it. I would say that what we would do here would be similar to that. Their parliamentary process for vetting is that different committees will come back to Congress, whereas for us the minister comes forward. Having a meeting on that certainly would be helpful because it would also eliminate some of the confusion around some of the clauses that we have to decide upon in Parliament.
I would think this is a very reasonable approach. I think it's almost unreasonable for us to continue the study without having this discussion. It gets to the point where we are reporting on something where the rules have already changed without us even having a commentary about that. It would be, quite frankly, absurd for us to pretend that we just are going to spend a year and a half and all this public money and time on a study about something that our number one trading partner...and our relationship is so germane. Even before this we've had testimony here from people talking about what the U.S. law is and the consequences to Canadian artists, cultural industries and so forth, whether we get a deal or not. And then the deal itself may not go through this particular Congress. We don't know.
What we do know right now is that we're being asked to do a report based upon the things that are in front of us, and one of them is now this potential deal between Canada and the United States. I think it's reasonable to have a meeting with the minister to get a lay of the land and have our report have a bit of commentary on that.
If we're going to have some commentary on it, I'd rather include the minister and I think it would probably provide a great opportunity for some of those questions to be clarified.
I know this doesn't include, for example, automotive but because we're doing this study it's very germane. I think that's why it gives it a little more merit in terms of their seeming to be so concerned about the politics behind this. I think we should have a separate meeting for automotive on it. I've gone through it and I've had trade lawyers go through it and there's a whole list of qualifiers in the automotive, which is very complex. But that doesn't have anything to do with what we're having right now. We're not doing an automotive study right now. We are doing the copyright review, and we just entered into an agreement that's going to change that. I think it would be a great opportunity for that to be part of what we submit. Sorry to go on, but I think it is important.
We're going to submit something to the minister but he's going to then have to respond and get something back to us and maybe do something before the Parliament ends. The timeline is constrained on that, so I think having that element as part of it would be most beneficial.
Having it without it, I assume would be odd. I think it would be the first thing that somebody would say. How did you actually do all this and then pretend that the United States deal didn't happen? It's worse than ignoring the elephant in the room. It's basically the elephant dies in the room and you walk over it and through it and it sits in the room and rots. Meanwhile, you have a deal going on. You keep talking. You keep going forward, and the stink gets worse.
I think one meeting would be great and that's enough.