Thank you for the question.
In terms of free trade agreements, first I'll step back. Canada has essentially been pursing trade and investment liberalization on three important tracks: there's of course the multilateral work that we're doing in Geneva; there's the all-important work with the United States and Mexico in the North American context; and then for at least the last 10 to 15 years there's been a third track, which is the bilateral liberalization. We have a number of tools to promote trade and investment liberalization bilaterally, of which a free trade agreement is one, although an extremely important and powerful tool.
We have right now agreements with United States and Mexico, the NAFTA. We have agreements with Israel and with Chile; those two agreements were concluded in 1997. And more recently we made an agreement with Costa Rica, which was concluded in 2001 and went into force in November 2002.
We have a number of negotiations that are ongoing. In 2001 we launched free trade negotiations with Singapore as well as with four Central American countries, the CA4 we call them. There are also negotiations ongoing with EFTA, the European Free Trade Association countries, that started in 1998, and more recently Korea. And I'll come back to Korea in a bit more detail to answer the second part of your question.
Every negotiation presents its own set of challenges. We're working, and have been working for some time, with each of the countries that we're negotiating with to try to resolve the different issues that stand in the way of an agreement.
Probably the agreement that's the furthest advanced right now is the negotiations with the Central America 4. In fact, a small team of us are going to be heading down to Guatemala next week to meet informally with our Central American counterparts. It will be the first face-to-face meeting with them since February 2004. So we're going to take stock of where we're at and see if we can find a way to resume in a formal fashion and try to negotiate and conclude this agreement as soon as possible.
It's no longer, if it ever was, an academic notion that the free trade agreements that other countries have with Canada's partners can impact on our market access. We see this case now quite vividly in Central America where the United States has a free trade agreement with the four Central American countries we're negotiating with plus Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. We're hearing reports that this is beginning to have an effect on established Canadian exporters to the region because now the United States is getting tariff-free treatment, at least for some products at the outset, in these countries whereas Canadian exporters are facing a tariff. I think this underlines the importance of resuming and trying to conclude that negotiation in particular.
But more generally on free trade agreements, we are working hard to figure out how we can make progress and finish up our negotiations with all of our current partners.
On Korea specifically, it's at a relatively early stage in the negotiation. We've only been formally negotiating with Korea since July 2005, and that was preceded by a thorough consultation process with Canadians. There is no schedule for concluding the agreement. We are not on the verge of concluding it. We do hear that the Koreans would like to conclude it by the end of this year, but Canada has not set out any target for concluding it. There is still an awful lot of work to do. These things are extremely complicated. We had the fifth round in Ottawa last month and we have the sixth and seventh rounds notionally scheduled for late June and late September of this year. So we have lots of work to do, but we're continuing to consult extremely intensively with a variety of Canadian interests, including the automobile industry and the shipbuilding industry.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
