Good morning, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee. Thank you for inviting us to be here with you this morning.
My name is Ken Frankel. I'm a lawyer and a political commentator based in Toronto, and a member of the board of directors of the Canadian Council for the Americas. As Mr. Chairman said, I'm joined by Eduardo Klurfan, who is a vice-president of Scotiabank, vice-president of the Canadian Council for the Americas, and the chairman of the Brazil-Canada Chamber of Commerce.
The CCA is the principal private sector link between Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean. As a networking information vehicle, the CCA's primary objective is to stimulate the expansion of Canadian commercial interests in the countries in the region.
The CCA creates awareness of opportunities that the region offers to Canadians, and it has been playing a key role in organizing outreach activities for heads of state, ministers, and business leaders from countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Brazil-Canada Chamber of Commerce is our sister organization and shares our goals and objectives by focusing on commercial relations between Canada and Brazil. The BCCC and the CCA are non-profit associations managed through I.E. Canada, which is the Canadian Association of Importers and Exporters.
We rely on our member companies, all of which have taken advantage of investment and trade opportunities in many countries in the region, for our financial support.
Our conversation today is radically different from what it would have been 25 or even 5 years ago. Many Latin American countries were run by authoritarian governments 25 years ago, and those that weren't vacillated between military control and weak civilian rule. With few exceptions, the economies were highly protectionist. Investment by outsiders was restricted entirely in many sectors, restricted to minority stakes in others, and subject to all manner of regulatory bottlenecks, currency controls, opaque requirements, and legal processes. Licensing intellectual property was particularly restrictive in the Andean region.
But as authoritarian governments were swept away, so were many of the former economic policies. The neo-liberal model, though not completely or competently undertaken in all instances, included the privatization of state enterprises, the elimination of some and streamlining of other regulatory requirements, and the relaxation of many barriers to foreign investment and trade with Latin America.