Thank you very much for the question.
I'm an economist by training and I chair the Edmonton chamber's trademark and access committee. We have great people on that committee. One of the things that we pushed through this year was support for the TPP policy, because we see it as being the next growth lever for western Canada and for Canada. Notwithstanding, there will be adjustments.
When we look at CETA and other agreements, one of the messages that comes out from our business community is that they don't really understand how these agreements may apply to them. Specific to the TPP, there has not been, to our knowledge, information provided on effects, impacts, or timing and so on. I can understand that, since it's still in process, but regardless, we believe we need to be part of that and we need to understand it. One of the gaps is understanding how this trade agreement will be applied.
As for other trade agreements, I was in Chile with the Alberta college system. I took about five colleges down to Chile. We met with one of the Chilean trade commissioners down there, and the president of the Canada-Chile Chamber of Commerce. I asked them how many companies were doing business down there, and they said one Canadian company is doing a mining sort of thing. Why aren't there more? It's because we just don't understand where these opportunities are. That's one of the gaps in this area.
Conversely, then, adapting a company to be ready to go internationally relies on scale and money. To develop an international market, it takes $100,000 or $200,000 a year. If you're a small-scale manufacturer with 10 employees, you barely have money to pay your bills right now, frankly, and to adapt into these changing environments is going to be difficult. It takes some information, and it's going to take some support and some scale-up programming, I think, to get companies big enough to take on these challenges.
In Canada, just as a sidebar on the Agreement on Internal Trade, we have many barriers in Canada among provinces that restrict our company size in certain industries. That's a problem, and we've got to deal with it. It's been on the books since 1995 or so. These things prevent us from being competitive, and I think that the message of competitiveness is fundamental. Canada is a trading nation. We want to trade. We've got to be prepared, and some of these barriers are in front of us.