Thank you for the questions.
I think you have put your finger on a very important issue, this unbalanced and unhealthy relationship, from the Canadian point of view, where we have relatively low job and value-added content to our main exports, and the Koreans have a very high value-added and job content to theirs. Obviously, in the abstract, theirs is the more desirable position.
Canadians have to pay attention to the quality of trade. It's not just a question of export expansion. We have to have a balanced trade policy. We have to have supportive government policies for our innovative and high value-added high-tech industries, those that have the greatest employment impacts directly and indirectly throughout the economy. That is what we used to call industrial policy, but the whole thrust of trade treaties is actually to try to prevent governments from adopting those policies and to rely on, simply, export expansion to achieve that. We have to rethink that.
In terms of studies, I will leave with the committee a very interesting study that doesn't directly address the Canada-Korea free trade agreement. It is a study by Informetrica—very new—commissioned by the Canadian labour movement, that basically stresses the importance of manufacturing and manufacturing exports for the Canadian economy. I can certainly ensure that the committee gets that.
Several members have raised the issue of dispute settlement, and you rightly point out that one of the reasons that Canada supposedly pursued the original free trade agreement with the United States was for an expedited dispute settlement mechanism, which would work better and faster than the WTO. That has not occurred. The softwood lumber deal dragged on for years, and in the end, when it was clear that the U.S. was about to thumb its nose for having finally lost yet again, Canada caved in and came to an agreement so that the inadequacies, if they weren't already clear to everyone, might be hidden.
In the Korea case, again, I doubt very much the experience of dispute settlement under bilaterals is unlikely to improve upon the WTO experience. The WTO dispute settlement mechanism may have problems, but being expeditious and timely is not one of them. It's quite expeditious and timely.