Thank you very much, Chair.
I appreciate the presentation, and I did have quite a few questions. I'm glad you took us through this presentation because some of the questions I had were answered, but there are still some outstanding issues.
In your balance of payments you identify some basic challenges with the way we track trade historically. But we've known and we've seen through various presentations over the past few weeks when we were looking at trade policy that trade has evolved substantially over the past few years in terms of becoming more integrated with global supply chains, and this concept of integrated trade that is being pushed forth by the Conference Board of Canada.... So these are various elements now that are coming, and there's a vocabulary that's developing to redefine how trade will be conducted on a going-forward basis.
When Canada makes decisions as a country, data is absolutely critical. Without that, we can't make any decisions, especially when we get into trade agreements, as we discussed, possibly with EFTA, and Korea, and so forth, and especially when we work at the WTO level.
After listening to this presentation, I'm a bit concerned, because when we talk about methodology and trade, Mr. Kuntz, I believe you alluded to a 1926 paper written about it--I wasn't around then--and then in 1988 there was an update on the methodologies.
My question is, do we really need to rethink how we calculate some of the trade metrics that we define in light of these changes, and what changes need to be made? I know you've identified quality concerns and so forth, but I think this goes a little bit above and beyond that because those quality concerns seem to be the traditional trade aspects. Does that make sense? Am I in the right ballpark there?