Thank you.
If you do not mind, I will answer in English. It will be clearer.
Many would say that we are too dependent on the United States. More than 80% of our trade is with the United States.
I mentioned before that our trade has become triangular. Much of our trade growth has been with globalized U.S. companies, and in that sense we are tapping into the global economy, albeit indirectly. So the 83% number probably is wrong, as a guide. It's probably much lower than that.
For example, our services trade is much more diversified globally. Our foreign affiliates operating out there are more like 50% United States, and 50% the rest of the world. It's the same thing with services trade. You can see there's something different going on when you measure it that way. So if we are sending goods to the United States that end up going to China or India...well, we don't know that from the statistics, but we presume there's a lot of it that we'd miss.
We are perhaps more global than we look. Certainly there is no need to incent companies to go global, because as I said before, the emerging markets are growing at two or three times the pace of their traditional markets. So there is a great deal of benefit to going global.
EDC is very active in that. Just to put out the big numbers, about 60% to 65% of what EDC does is in the United States, even though more than 80% of what Canadian companies want to do is in the United States. So you can see that EDC is much more focused on taking those opportunities out into the world.
What prevents Canada from being more diversified? I think it may be more a case of there being some obvious advantages to focusing on the relationship that is so good with the United States. And of course the U.S. is itself the biggest, most diversified economy in the world already. So in terms of diversification, there is a lot already there.
As for intellectual property, very briefly, Mr. Chairman, this comes up quite a lot. Canadian companies say, “I'm a little worried about going into China, because I'm worried about my intellectual property. I'm worried about going into Eastern Europe; I'm worried about intellectual property.” That's a real worry. But I would just say that every company in the world faces those same challenges. Canadian companies aren't uniquely challenged by this. Somehow our American counterparts have managed to get over that. They've been very aggressive investors in China despite those intellectual property challenges.
I also think it's improving with time. The actual business ethic and the ability to work there are on an upward track. It's far different from what it was five or ten years ago, so I'm quite encouraged about the way that is evolving.