Lee Richardson at the International Trade Committee

Welcome to the fifth meeting of this session of the Standing Committee on International Trade.

We're continuing our discussion of Bill C-2, An Act to implement the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the States of the European Free Trade Association (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland), the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Republic of Iceland, the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Kingdom of Norway and the Agreement on Agriculture between Canada and the Swiss Confederation.

Appearing today is the Honourable Tony Clement , the Minister of Industry. With Minister Clement we have the deputy minister, Richard Dicerni. Thank you for coming. We also have the assistant deputy minister, industry sector, David Maloney. And we have the director general, aerospace, defence and marine branch, Chummer Farina.

I appreciate your coming again today. We have a particular section of this bill that is relevant, and a request was made for you to discuss it.

In practice, we have one hour. We'll go to a vote at...I think it will now be 10 o'clock, because we're a little slow starting.

If you could, Mr. Minister, I'd like you to give us a brief opening statement. Generally I think the questions are prepared. We've studied this for about eight months now, so I think most of us are very familiar with the situation. I'll let you open, and then we'll go to questioning.

We'll begin the questioning with seven-minute rounds, and we'll try to keep our questions and answers in each case to seven minutes in the first round.

With that, Mr. Minister, thank you again for coming. I'll let you begin.