Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I did have some other questions, but I want to just make a couple of responses to the NDP's opinion on this.
It seems to me that just about two weeks ago we had representatives from the shipbuilding industry, including a union leader. As I recall, in some of the closing comments they said they were pleased with a number of things. They expressed some pleasure with the 15-year extension in the tariff arrangements, the structured financing provisions, and also, of course, the accelerated capital cost allowance, which all things go into. On the overall look at EFTA, there are things that will assist some of the things that may appear to be not quite good enough for the shipbuilding industry. This will help offset those things, and I think they've done a good job.
As I think was stated by Sam, when you're doing these free trade agreements, the countries involved have to be acting in the broad national interest of business in their countries. And while there are some on this hill who like to kind of cherry-pick the negative parts and base their arguments on those, I think in this case we truly are acting in the broad national interest. And while there will never be a perfect free trade agreement between any countries, it's the broader interest that has to prevail at the end of the day.
Now I have a couple of questions.
Mr. Laurin talked about some opportunities that existed even in these challenging times. We all know that challenges do bring opportunities. I just wonder if you could touch on a couple of opportunities specifically that exist now, or that you see, and how we, as a government, can make sure maybe some of these come to fruition.
And then Mr. Stewart-Patterson could perhaps talk on how these times have forced Canada to look at a much broader global market. We've been very comfortable having most of our eggs in the U.S. basket. I mean, it's convenient, it's profitable, but it's times like this that show us that maybe we should have been expanding our vision of our global trade opportunities to kind of mitigate things like this that happen.
I'll just leave you gentlemen with that.