Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm pleased to be here today. I'll start by talking about the mandate of Global Affairs Canada and the relationship between our free trade agreements and regulations. This issue is relevant to the topic of the meeting.
In terms of the type of work we do in the department in my area related to trade negotiations and regulation, we have a number of initiatives as part of our free trade negotiation and our trade agreement negotiation strategies. We try to complement those improvements in access to markets that are achieved through the reduction of tariffs to make sure that regulatory barriers don't present obstacles that are insurmountable for our businesses in order for them to then take advantage of these new markets.
There's a dedicated series of units within the department that work full time on that sort of issue, on non-tariff barriers to trade, and as part of our free trade agreements we have a chapter on technical barriers to trade. That is essentially referring to those types of regulations that can have high compliance costs or that can in fact form a complete barrier to entry to a market for Canadian business.
We also negotiate chapters in more recent agreements, which we call good regulatory practice chapters, and those are to set out the types of rules and procedures that we find are common here in Canada and are built into the cabinet directive on regulation, which, as Ms. McRae just mentioned, was updated in the fall of 2018. This is to try to bring that kind of discipline in regulatory development and new regulation-making to our major trading partners.
In the case of large trading partners, such as the European Union, we in fact have in our trade agreements like the CETA formal arrangements on co-operation between regulatory authorities. That is designed to ensure that as new regulations are developed that are going to be important for trade between us and our partners, they can be done together and with a view to trying to avoid unnecessary differences.
That's the type of framework that we try to put in place to help to complement the reductions in tariffs.
Thank you.