I've been quite quiet so far, because my job is to work through our embassy in Washington and our consulates across the country, through our trade commissioners and our advocacy officers. This question provides me an opportunity to tell you what we've done so far and to explain a little bit about what we see is going to occur in the next few months.
Even from the earliest days when the Buy American provisions of the recovery act appeared, we could already see that this was going to have an impact on companies. My colleagues in our consulates and our colleagues in our regional offices across the country were receiving phone calls from companies saying, “My customer is telling me that I can't bid, and now what am I going to do?” or “I've been trying to bid on this, and I can't understand what they require of me.”
So we've been doing troubleshooting for many months. We held workshops in 10 locations across Canada for a whole cross-section of Canadian companies in many industries, very often for those working in water and waste water, heating, ventilating, air conditioning, or industrial controls. Generally speaking, as Dany explained, they were not at prime contractor level but at sub-contractor level. We've done webinars.
The fact is that very often we've not been successful. Quite often we've indicated to a company that it could apply for a waiver, and this is what it should do, and while some companies have been successful, others have said they thought it was too much paperwork to bother with.
One of the benefits of this agreement is that now we have something concrete that a company can put in its hand and take into the contracting authority and say, “This is the exemption for Canada, and these are the seven programs where we're exempted. Also, these are the 37 states, and these are the programs in those 37 states that are covered.” They have a piece of paper they can take in, and they can prove what their rights are. Before that, all we could say was that we had guaranteed access at the federal level. We had no protections at the sub-federal level, whether it was recovery act funding or normal state funding. That made it very difficult to, as a trade commissioner, be able to give our companies a tool to be able to go and push for market access and try to capture contracts. So now they have a tool. It's maybe not everything we might have hoped it would be in the beginning, because it isn't everything, but some companies that could not be successful before will be successful now.
As Dany has explained, the important goal now is really to go after a permanent comprehensive agreement that can overcome some of the carve-outs you've identified in the coverage of the 37 states and to obtain some kind of certainty for these companies that we work with. It won't be easy, because in Canada the agreement is pretty well known even though there are questions about what it covers and doesn't cover. In the United States, however, it's not as well known, so our trade commissioners and our advocacy officers have been reaching out to governors' offices, mayors' offices, business associations, and individual companies to try to explain to them that the agreement exists. They've been making photocopies and sending links to websites regarding these opportunities so that when a Canadian company wants to bid, they're going to say, “Yes, we just heard about this arrangement from your consulate”. Hopefully, they'll hear about it from the U.S. government as well, but we want to be sure, so our consulates are doing this outreach.
As we go forward into the future, we are trying to identify those companies that are indeed benefiting from access to the Canadian market, or benefiting from being able to use Canadian suppliers in their supply chains so they will say to the federal government that it's good for America to advocate and to engage in future negotiations.
This is a long way down the line, but this is a systematic process of building our networks and trying to draw people's attention to the benefits for individual enterprises.