Yes, because there's the issue of the quantity of jobs, and I think there's a very legitimate perception that over the last ten or fifteen years what we've seen is an erosion, both to a certain extent in the quantity of good jobs and also in the quality of the jobs that are available within the Canadian economy.
Some people, and I'm one of them, believe that our trade policies are in large part responsible for that, that what we're intending to do is substitute the good manufacturing jobs that we had in Canada in the past for lower-paid service jobs. In fact, Statistics Canada seems to back that up. In their most recent studies, they've indicated that most of the jobs created today in the Canadian economy are part-time or temporary in nature and don't come with things like benefits that existed in the past, such as pensions. So what we've seen is an erosion of the good jobs.
One of the reasons that people put forward is that we are putting all our eggs in one basket, and that is in trade with the United States, with 86% of our trade now going to the United States. That's something that a small-business person certainly wouldn't do. They wouldn't concentrate on dealing with one client, because that, of course, leaves you vulnerable to that client. We've seen with softwood lumber and with BSE that this vulnerability is something that can be a real problem for us.
So coming to the issue of trade diversification, is that something the association discusses? Do you have specific recommendations on how we can diversify our trade so we're not as vulnerable to our relationship with the United States and in a very real sense we're diversifying the possibilities around the world?