Thank you very much. I want to pursue one of your strategies for success, number four, which talks about focusing on international trade and investment strategies. You mention multinational agreements, and you're probably aware of some of the challenges we have faced. When you bring many countries together, in a sense it's a bit of a silver bullet. If you actually manage to wrestle a multinational trade agreement to the ground, it's beneficial to all parties, but there are many competing interests; every country has its own interest. Trying to negotiate it and make headway on it is very challenging.
I think there are also too many other factors. There are trade issues, but there are other factors, many of which are political, that play into it as well.
We've been studying bilateral trade possibilities here as a committee. One of the advantages is that we're of course able to target our efforts to particular countries, if there are particular countries with which we think having an agreement would be beneficial to Canada. It falls into one of your other suggestions, which is basically targeting certain markets. You mentioned China and India.
I have two questions related to looking at bilateral agreements. One of them is about import-focused bilateral agreements and from where you would see it as advantageous to Canadian industry to be able to import sub-assemblies, etc.
We were speaking to you today, and we spoke to the EDC earlier this week about integrated supply chain management. It's probably very difficult to select one country and know that it would be very good for imports and very good for exports. Each country probably has its leanings. We spoke about China today, and you said we might import a lot but not export a lot of finished product to China.
One of my questions is whether you have recommendations concerning import-focused countries we should be looking at in terms of bilateral agreements and then, on the other hand, export-focused countries with which we would put in place bilateral agreements.