I'm not one of those who would stand up and say we're too close to the United States in terms of our membership and their desire to continue to do business with the United States. One of the factors we haven't talked too much about today is the mix of companies and the size, in particular, of companies in Canada. As we know, small and medium enterprises form the bulk of our membership--obviously, because that's what the Canadian business community looks like. We have few very large firms, though we have them in many sectors of the economy. But we have lots of small firms, and they have their own challenges, even dealing with the United States, for a number of reasons that we've covered here today. Some of these would apply equally to larger companies, and some would be unique in terms of the nature of small companies and trying to do business outside of our own borders. From that standpoint, I think there's still more to be done vis-à-vis the U.S. Whether you want to use SPP, as I've suggested, and the 300 initiatives there, focusing on important things like how we can do better with the border and how we can fix--that wonderful phrase--the tyranny of small differences on regulation with the United States...I think that's beautifully said. All of those still need to be front and centre.
In terms of dealing with other economies, we're in an incredibly competitive game with respect to that. Looking at bilaterals, I think the numbers I saw recently show that our friends south of the border have market power, if I could put it that way, in terms of going to other economies and saying, “Let's negotiate a free trade agreement.” I think they've put about a dozen of them through Congress recently, with three more ready to go and another eleven in the negotiating stage. That's a pretty formidable level of activity. We don't have that going on today.
With China, we tried to do two things in terms of the document we produced. One was to acknowledge the fact that the opportunity is there. I think Glen's quite right in terms of saying that there are challenges. There are lots of challenges. Some of them are inside our own economy, in terms of our ability to do infrastructure development to allow us to cope with the opportunity to do business with China.
What we did was we tried to look at all of the aspects of the relationship. One of the things we did end up focusing on--and it's one of nine or ten that we included in our document--was this relationship question that Mr. Temelkovski raised in terms of how well positioned we are in China. One of the things the government made a fairly big deal about in the last year or so was--and it's something we supported--opening more consulates in the United States. That was a good thing to do. We're now in many more areas and regions of the United States than we were before. We don't do a very good job of that in China yet.
There's much more that can be done, in terms of thinking. That's one small thing.
Governance, in terms of the file inside the Government of Canada, needs to be looked at. How are we focused? Do we have somebody who has a primary responsibility to think about leadership on the file? I don't think we're that well coordinated yet. I think we're just getting going on this. One of the reasons we produced our piece was to try to make a contribution to the trade department's thinking on this process that is under way now.
I think there are a number of specific things you could do, but that would be one of the ways, from a framework perspective, to start it.