Good afternoon. We're prepared to begin our 25th meeting of this session of the Standing Committee on International Trade.
We are going to continue our study of the status of free trade agreements and ongoing negotiations between Canada and Colombia, the focus being on how environmental impacts and human rights concerns are being addressed.
Because we expect there will be a third language involved today, we're going to change our translation service. We will have simultaneous English, French, and Spanish delivered on the little devices you have been presented with.
I have the honour to welcome His Excellency Jaime Giron Duarte, from Colombia. It's our great pleasure to have you here today. I appreciate your accepting our invitation to meet with our committee today.
The format will simply be that I will ask His Excellency for opening remarks, with a general emphasis on the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement. Then we will move to questions of the committee members. We will try to keep the first round to seven minutes for each participant; that would be seven minutes for the question and answer.
We're going to have two sections today, and they're probably going to run about 45 minutes each, so we'll try to keep to the time. If any member wishes to share his time, he might indicate that to the chair at the outset of the questioning.
Without further delay, I'm going to ask His Excellency if he would begin.