Good afternoon. I'm very pleased that you're with us today. I'm very much interested in agriculture. You're very important for us in Quebec and for Canada as a whole. I would also say that you are important in the rural world as well. I come from a rural riding, and I'm always concerned about how agriculture is doing. When it doesn't do well, the rural community does poorly as well. There's a lot of talk about the survival of our rural communities and the fact that survival is directly related to the good health of agriculture.
I listened to you all, and I of course noted that you seemed to be unanimously in favour of the Canada-Korea Agreement. The elimination of tariffs will enable you to export more to Korea. One issue is the difficulties the pork and beef industries are experiencing, and I'm going to come back to that later. Wine and canola, among others, are also very important sectors for you. Moreover, as you are no doubt aware, representatives of other sectors have appeared before this committee. We've met with representatives of the automotive industry, and they presented data showing that a free trade agreement with Korea would push Canada's trade balance with that country into a significant deficit.
As parliamentarians, we want to ensure that the agreement is fair. We want it to benefit the agricultural sector because we believe in it, but we note that other sectors are less comfortable with this agreement. Have you determined whether the agreement might in fact be favourable to one sector and unfavourable to another? Do you believe it would be possible to negotiate provisions that would make this agreement less harmful to the manufacturing sector, while supporting exports to a greater degree? In your view, what room to manoeuvre could we exploit?
As regards BSE, the beef association stated that we should suspend our negotiations with Korea until it opens its borders to beef. What is your opinion on that subject?