Okay. I'll probably go back in reverse order and forget the first one by the end.
We also heard the stories about the experience with Europe. The method, though, of negotiating safeguards is a method between, obviously, the Government of Canada and, eventually, China. To start safeguard negotiations, the minister of trade, I understand, simply has to send a letter to China indicating they want to negotiate safeguards on some categories, and that would immediately start the ball rolling.
But as happened in Europe, the U.S. and South Africa, they're actually rolled out in a certain set of categories and negotiated. It's not necessarily all categories of apparel and textiles that are rolled out. It is a negotiated process, so I'd hope that we would have learned from the Europeans.
Our safeguard complaint, I should make it clear, was actually in eight very specific categories. It's hard to confess, but there are some categories of clothing that have now become so dominated by imports, in particular from China, that most of the jobs and the manufacturing operations have been lost already. So when we chose the eight categories we submitted to the CITT, we were actually very specifically interested in categories that had real employment in them, things like men's suits, which have been considered expensive products in the past. So men's and boys' suits were, of course, one of the categories, because quality has always been such an important issue in that category. It's the manufacturing that has survived all of the adjustments through many different free trade agreements. So we chose very specific categories that had high levels of employment and also, frankly, in some cases had historical significance in Canada.
You spoke about Montreal. As I said, I understand there are going to be some folks here next week talking to you about the Quebec experience. Montreal is still the third largest apparel manufacturing centre in North America after New York and L.A., and the men's suit industry, in particular, has always had a real place within Montreal's life and culture. So we chose very specific categories that we think would be able to maintained—and jeans, by the by, are not one of them.
We are aware of a number of the different programs. I would probably defer the question on the Quebec adjustment programs to Lina Aristeo from our Quebec council, who I understand is coming next week.
The raw products issue is quite difficult, the lifting of....Textile plants have in fact also gone through many of the same problems as we've seen in apparel. Again, our request for safeguards was just for eight specific categories of apparel goods. And we don't deny this is a complex industry. Manufacturing itself is under a lot of pressure in Canada from the competition from around the world.
But again, we really wanted to look at just this one measure, which actually can only be implemented until the end of 2008, allowing apparel manufacturing in these specific categories to adjust and make those adjustments to this new order, which is what Europe and the U.S. did.