Jay's done a great job of opening up the debate. In fact, rather than having six points, I can only make three, because I'm going to play off many of the comments he's made.
First of all, I should tell the committee that the Conference Board is very close to publishing the biggest piece of work we've ever done. It's a project called the Canada Project—a pretty grand name—funded largely by the private sector three years ago. We have produced 26 research reports to date and we have more to come. We'll be publishing in January in three volumes, one on Canada's place in globalization—how do we stay a rich nation—one on resources, and one on cities as a driver of wealth.
Perhaps more important for the committee, Maclean's will be doing a preview of this, taking pretty much a full edition in mid-November, as they do with universities and other things.
The magazine L'Actualité is going to do the same thing in French. I believe their coverage will be shorter but it will be of the same quantity and will transmit the same message.
We're very excited, because the Conference Board will have a chance to share its thinking on Canada's place in globalization with the entire country, using Maclean's but also trying to reach idea leaders such as yourselves.
We're basically going to set out a series of core strategies for creating wealth in Canada, and trade and investment policy is at the centre of it. It's a critical piece of the national productivity strategy, so there I agree with my colleague Mr. Myers entirely.
We've been debating violently and agreeing, Jay, for about fifteen years now, and again we're in full agreement that having a well-articulated international trade and investment policy is right at the heart of our productivity agenda of creating wealth within Canada.
Trade matters for two reasons, effectively. It matters because it allows us to reach more markets around the world; it gives us access to billions of consumers rather than tens of millions. But it also keeps us honest: it raises the level of competition within Canada.
Economists are trained to see the value of trade. Really, what we're talking about is keeping our businesses sharp, exposing them to international competition, forcing them to innovate and to adapt more quickly, and frankly, I think we've gone to sleep over the last decade. I'll come back to that in my third message.
The core message for us is that trade and investment is right at the centre of developing a well-articulated national productivity strategy.
Secondly, I'd like to agree with Jay that for us trade and investment are not separable. They're really completely integrated. In fact, there's an expression now being used increasingly in government, “integrative trade”. It's actually a term I created about four years ago when I was at EDC to try to demonstrate how inseparable imports are from exports, investment is from trade, services are from goods. They're all now integrated parts of a whole, and our whole trade policy approach—policy practices within government, how you negotiate—has to take that as the backdrop.
We're still stuck in a world of mercantilism, where we largely see exports as good and imports as bad, and we want a little bit of investment, but we only want it on certain terms. That doesn't work any more. The world has already moved beyond Canada. We've become a laggard rather than a leader in international trade. I think it's time for us to move to the front of the pack.
And maybe that's the third message, that since NAFTA, Canada has really become a follower on international trade. We are no longer a leader within the World Trade Organization. We're not part of the inner circle of people making policy. We have not aggressively pursued NAFTA deepening. We only have three very small bilateral deals, while the rest of the world is out negotiating like crazy. The Americans, the Chinese, and the Europeans are extremely active now, trying to expand their access to other markets and also to create competition integration. It's about time Canada got really into the game.
I can talk about that in greater depth as we go on, but perhaps I'll just stop right there.