All right, let me take a step back and say that a well-articulated trade policy basically has three pieces. One, your business has to be ready to go and compete internationally, and that's why we put so much weight on the concept of a single market in Canada, ending the balkanization and allowing our firms to achieve optimum scale here so they really have that sharp edge that's needed to compete internationally.
The second piece is about market access, and that's what international trade negotiation is all about. Right now we can see Doha drifting. We've gone 13 years with NAFTA, and, as we articulated in our report, we think NAFTA has effectively matured. There's no more dynamic energy coming out of NAFTA. Firms are not restructuring any more, so there's a lot of capacity there to both broaden the coverage of NAFTA by including things like services in much more detail, and also deepen it through much greater effort around harmonization. Maybe that's the wrong word. Harmonization is a little bit scary sometimes, politically, but I think we can say alignment of regulatory standards and processes without giving up any of our sovereignty. Often we have slightly different standards that achieve exactly the same end, so we need to find ways to penetrate more deeply with the United States in the integration of North America, and then pursue other markets.
The third piece you're talking about is on the trade investment promotion side, but that is basically the sales force of a company. It's perfectly fine to talk about diversification and whether we have the right resources in place for sales, but we want to make sure that we have all three pieces in place and that we are actually building companies that are going to be competitive internationally, which can go out there and win market share based upon high-quality products and price, and the issue of market access.
When it comes to diversification, we all want to be more diversified, but you can't push a string, and without having these first two pieces, without having more active market access negotiations, let's say, bilaterally, regionally, multilaterally, there's really only so much you can do by mobilizing more resources in the field. I would argue strongly that you really have to look at all three pieces.
Clearly, 83% of our exports go to the United States, and our trade, frankly, with other parts of the world has not grown for some time now. It's actually fallen considerably with Japan, so arguing for more investment in trade development officers, let's say, on the ground with Japan without cracking the nut of market access with the Japanese is probably not going to be a very efficient use of resources.
It is the same thing with Europe and the same thing with many other markets. I would like to put at least as much weight on the export and investment readiness piece and the market access piece as I would on the number of trade commissioners in the field.