Let me try to qualify that. It is the commission that negotiates, not the Parliament. Once the Lisbon treaty is enforced, which is not the case now, we'll vote at the end of the negotiation period to support or not support, whatever finishes that negotiation. It's in the way the U.S. Senate needs to vote, or whatever, on what the U.S. government has negotiated. That's what will happen once the Lisbon treaty is enforced.
The negotiating power is the commission. The commission acts under a mandate of the Council of Ministers. No member state or three or four member states together can ever negotiate an international trade on their own. That's impossible. That's illegal. That would be void.
Of course, what a member state can do, or several member states can do, is put that on the agenda of the Council of Ministers, to promote that negotiation so that the Council of Ministers gives a specific mandate to the commission. Of course, political initiatives need to come from somewhere. It might be that the member state is specifically interested in negotiating within an area where the negotiation has not taken place or to bring in certain issues into that negotiating mandate.
That will be a Council of Ministers' decision. The commission accepts that mandate, if that is voted and agreed to by a qualified majority. It is not a unanimous vote. If the Council of Ministers decides to give that mandate, then the commission will start the mandate with Canada or any other country.
That's not an arguable opinion. No member state nor group of member states can negotiate. To say it the other way around, once this has been negotiated and it has been approved, it applies to the European Union as a whole. By nature, if it's something that the European Union is, it is a single market. In other things we have been improving, we have been evolving, and we are adding new powers.
The thing we are from the very start is a common market, a single market. Once a product enters the European Union, it needs to circulate freely and completely through the whole European Union. That is a basic legal principle in European Union law. A product that has been put on the market in the European Union in a most distant corner needs to be allowed to circulate through the whole without any barrier internally. We do not have any internal trade borders.
I don't know whether you want to add something to this. There is a European Commission representative here.