Thank you.
I hope I've written down all the points you've made. You state that it's important to have a fair agreement, and we would agree with that. How you measure “fair” tends to be very different if you are on the winning side of the equation from when you're on the losing side of the equation. So perhaps another word that might be used is a “balanced” trade agreement, one that understands that there will be participants in your country who will have a negative impact. We definitely wouldn't support something that subsidizes those who are negatively impacted. It keeps them doing the same thing that can't compete on an international market. There is value in looking at what can be done to help companies transition to what they can do and compete with in an international marketplace.
You mentioned that many jobs have been lost in Quebec because of free trade agreements. I would suggest to you that many more have been created. You only have to look at some of the amazing Canadian success stories that reside in Quebec to see what real opportunities come from good free trade agreements. Look at Bombardier, as an example. We could all list many more. So Quebeckers have definitely also benefited from free trade agreements.
Regarding the balance of trade with Korea, that is one of the prime objectives of this free trade agreement, to try to readjust that balance of trade and get more Canadian goods and services into Korea.
On your point on non-tariff barriers for the automotive sector, yes, they definitely exist. The U.S. has been working on trying to move some of these non-tariff barriers for a significant amount of time, and the North American automobile industry remains very frustrated that they have not been able to achieve significant success.
If you look at the percentage of automobiles that are sold in Korea that are made by a company that has a foreign parent, it's minuscule. There's no logical reason why Koreans wouldn't want to buy more cars if they had more selection. So this is something that's important. I know it was something that was of primary interest in the U.S. negotiations. It's also very much of interest to the Europeans. Where we have a 6% tariff that is helping to limit the number of Korean automobiles that come into Canada, in Europe it's over 10%, so they have an even bigger challenge. They're definitely going to be pushing for and looking for real measures that can show tangible ways in which non-tariff barriers will be removed, and real measures that will allow them to measure that and bring in some sort of dispute settlement mechanism when they feel the non-tariff barriers have not been removed properly.