Thank you, Mr. Burney and all your officials, for coming again today. We apologize for keeping you waiting. We know your time is valuable, and we thank you for taking the time out this afternoon.
My thought is, along with what my colleague talked about in terms of supply chains and value chains globally, that when one enters into a free trade agreement, sometimes people just talk about what are the benefits dollar for dollar, import and export. I think one of the things this ignores is the whole notion of value chains and how they fit in, and what type of value-added we could get.
You touched on it before. You touched on it in your comments, and I know my friend from the NDP is always concerned about trading for lower-paying jobs. Their perception with any free trade agreement is that we get a bunch of hourly workers versus high-tech workers, or as you talked about, mining or oil and gas.
Talk to us a bit about that. I believe it's going to help to create more prosperity through higher-value type of work that we can get into. So could you talk about the value chain and how it fits in and how we could actually benefit as Canadians from this type of agreement?