I have talked a bit previously, so I'll be very brief.
Effectively, I think we have to think of the world in three big blocs right now. There's the North American bloc, where we're very lucky to live in arguably the best neighbourhood in the world.
Ben's absolutely right. Our future lies in deepening NAFTA. Non-tariff barriers are the critical next issue. It's very hard to negotiate with the Americans, though, if we don't have our act together at home.
One of the other messages in our forthcoming work is that we need to create a single Canadian market when it comes to regulation and deregulation. We need to eliminate all the crazy barriers that exist between provinces, and we need to have much improved alignment between the federal and provincial levels when it comes to regulation of everything, frankly. The number of examples you can give of dumb regulation in this country are absolutely staggering.
So there are three big blocs. One is North America. Which other bloc do we want to negotiate with? Do we want to negotiate with the Europeans, who are very inward-looking? There is expansion eastward in Europe. The Europeans are very much looking to the newly emerged economies in eastern Europe, but I believe there is a relative barrier around Europe that makes it very hard for Canada to do more trade with Europe.
Or are we going to look west, where the growth rates are spectacular? China is going to grow at 8% to 10% a year for the next 20 years. India is 10 years behind China, and it can grow faster than that potentially in 20 to 25 years.
I think there are huge inroads that could be made, but it will really require a fundamental shift in attitude in Canadian foreign policy and in our entire thinking toward Asia. Right now, in fact, our market shares are falling in places like China. We've actually seen our share of both trade and investment decline over the last ten years, because we don't have a plan.
So I would argue very strongly for thinking of going forward with a twin-track policy. We deepen within NAFTA, and we start to think about how to expand into the very rapidly growing Asian market.