Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Welcome back, to you, of course, Mr. Chairman, and to all my colleagues as well.
I have a couple of points on what Mr. Cannis has said, starting off, and on what Mr. Brison has said.
Before I get into that, maybe I'll deal with the “buy American” part of it. Perhaps we should look at it as a committee. We all have our four points that we can use for travel to the U.S. now. I think instead of doing that on an ad hoc basis, as a committee we should sit down and work out a policy among the parties whereby we say twice a year we're going to go to the U.S. We'll set that up so it works with their congressmen and their senators, and it works with their Congress, instead of just suddenly putting a motion forward. That would then leave us two more points for those emergency situations when we're all of sudden in a bilateral discussion that's not going well or the Americans have decided to put an embargo of some sort in place. I think it's something we should be doing routinely instead of on an ad hoc basis, and I'd be willing to engage in that conversation. I think it would make a lot of sense. They're our closest neighbours, our largest trading partners. It's a very important border. It's something that we should have been doing, probably, years ago, but it's something that we should talk about. So “buy American” would be the first thing.
The other issue is that we will have free trade agreements coming back to the House. The government business has to take precedence once it comes to committee, so that changes our schedule up as well. But at the end of the day, if we get Colombia back on the order sheet, we'll have Jordan on the order sheet, and we'll possibly have a couple of others there as well. During the process of continued negotiations for a comprehensive agreement with the European nations, it would make a lot of sense, as Mr. Cannis has said, to engage in very thorough bilateral discussions with the European Union, which would include boards of trade here in Canada, and those would also possibly involve visiting the EU.
It's not that the rest of them, India, China, Russia, Brazil, are not important--we know they are--but we have only so much time and so many members. So I think if we can narrow our focus down a little bit, we'll all benefit.