To address the issue of the adequacy of the governmental authority exclusion in the GATS, article I(3)(c), I don't believe—and this view is shared by many—that this is an effective exemption. It's certainly not a full exemption for public services. It states that services provided in the exercise of governmental authority are excluded from the treaty, but it goes on to further define that as services that are provided neither on a commercial nor a competitive basis, nor in competition with one or more service suppliers.
Most of what we call public service systems, as Monsieur Paquette was alluding to in the day care or child care area, are mixed systems, and the boundary between public and private is changing all the time. Often public service providers, such as universities, compete with private service providers, and they have advantages that are not extended to private service providers because they have responsibilities and obligations to provide services, which private service providers do not have. So the exclusion itself is not that comforting.
Despite being pushed on this, many governments, particularly from the developed countries, who are trying to push the expansion of the GATS, are reluctant to define the meaning of that more carefully. They prefer to leave it vague. In other words, it will be decided in dispute settlement at some point in the future, which I don't think is satisfactory.
On the specific issue of what happens if a provincial government, which doesn't have the benefit of exclusion, decides to proceed with public auto insurance, no, it doesn't mean that they absolutely cannot do it, but it does create a serious problem. Canada would have to go back to the WTO to invoke an article of the GATS to basically change its schedule and provide adjustment, which would mean, in the WTO context, that you have to commit equivalent sectors under the treaty. This is a significant deterrent, and if you look at WTO documents, sometimes they call commitments effectively irreversible for that reason. If you can't negotiate a satisfactory arrangement, you could face trade sanctions, and those could come in areas other than services.
Finally, on telecommunications, right now our foreign ownership provisions—restrictions—are excluded in our GATS schedule. As long as that doesn't change, they would provide effective protection. Those of us who support those provisions have to be vigilant that they're not changed, because once they are, they're gone virtually forever in that case.