On your question about the competitiveness of China and India and other Asian economies and how we meet that challenge, I would go back to my introductory remarks and say the first thing we need to do is have sound domestic economic fundamentals and make sure that our businesses are operating in the healthiest economic environment possible.
That, of course, involves a whole range of domestic economic policies—fiscal, regulatory, labour market, infrastructure—and I know that the government has programs in all of those areas, well outside of my domain, so I don't need to go into them. That's where we start.
Within the international trade regime, I believe the best thing we can do is bring these countries, and China particularly, which until very recently had more or less been outside the international regime, into the regime. They are now a member of the WTO; they now have to respect all of the WTO's obligations as well as receive its benefits. They are engaging in international commerce. We clearly see that; they've become our second largest trading partner very quickly. They've become the third largest trader in the world very quickly, having surpassed Canada and Japan since they joined the WTO less than five years ago. They are a very dynamic economy.
What we don't want to do is shut ourselves off from the opportunity to trade with them. What we do want to do is trade with them on reasonable terms, and as I say, the best way to do that is to bring them into the international system and make sure they respect their obligations. In those instances, which do arise, where a Canadian industry is faced with overwhelming competition from a competitor abroad, we have import policies to provide transitional relief or assistance to them.
Your third question was about whether we should be concerned about an over-dependence on the trade performance of our natural resources. Personally, I've always been one who believed you play from your strength. If our strength is--and it clearly is--our resource wealth, then we should take advantage of it. We should build our economy from it, but of course we need to be sure that we're getting value added in extraction and production in Canada, especially in our exports.
We also need to be able to diversify our economy and move into higher value-added and knowledge-intensive areas of the economy and be sure that we export from those areas as well. If you look at our trade data and the performance of Canadian business, you'll see that this is happening and that we have some very competitive industries in the high end and the knowledge-intensive end of our economy. I think that's encouraging.
But we shouldn't deny the resource wealth we have and we should be prepared to build from it.