The other thing to keep in mind, which was touched upon by both Ken and Stewart, is that when you talk about agreements, you have to remember that we also have other agreements in place, such as on foreign investment protection, science and technology, and the air negotiations. So if you're talking about agreements, there is a whole range of tools that we use, as was mentioned, to assist Canadian business across the country.
On the EU, if you go back to the Canada-EU summit in October of last year, you will see that the Prime Minister and Mr. Sarkozy and Barroso announced that we would be looking to obtain our mandates to launch negotiations for comprehensive trade negotiations sometime as early as possible in 2009.
Since the summit we have been working with the European Commission on what is referred to as a “scoping exercise”, trying to map out the scope, the breadth, and perimeter of what could potentially be negotiated in an agreement, should it be launched. We've made a lot of headway in the last little while, and we are hoping that this part of the process will be concluded shortly.
Ideally, what we would like to see at the next Canada-EU summit is a formal launch of negotiations with the European Union, but there are still a number of steps before that. We first have to conclude the scoping exercise we're involved in, normally referred to as an “exploratory process”, which we do with every trading partner. Basically you sit down and try to determine what would be part of a negotiation and what would be excluded. Then once we have a sense of what the lay of the land could be in a negotiation, we will then have to go and seek a formal mandate from cabinet, whereupon the negotiations would proceed.
So we are working our way on a step-by-step basis. This is essentially the same process that we would do with all of our trading partners. We are dealing with the European Union, because they have, as I said earlier, 27 member states. Anything you do with them is usually a bit more complicated than dealing with an individual country.
So it's just a process that's working its way through. But for the moment, we are—