Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I thought you were going to be kind to Monsieur Guimond, as you were last week, and maybe give him some extra time.
Thank you very much for coming, folks.
Let me start with Mr. Laurin. I'm looking at a policy paper you put together with your colleagues back in February of 2008, which I have to tell you I used fairly extensively in a lot of lobbying I did with municipal councils in the Niagara region. In fact, I lobbied over half of them and was successful in all cases in talking about Buy Canadian in municipal procurement.
They actually thought they were under NAFTA, which of course we here all know is untrue. Municipalities were under the misguided belief that NAFTA covered them because the Canadian government had signed on to it. They had used that as part of their excuse not to buy Canadian with what I say is the people's dollars. They don't make profits; they collect money like every government, and it's the people's money that they collect. What I expressed to them was that they had an obligation to spend the people's money on the very people they took it from in the first place.
Of course, I used your report. I'll paraphrase it; I know that you know this report really well. You believe, according to this document of 2008, that this was a good policy instrument that the Canadian government should use; that, indeed, we should invest in Canadian manufacturers as those from whom to buy local procurement.
But today I'm hearing you say to us that the deal is not as good as you would like it to be, but that it opens the door to opening the markets eventually. So really, according to this, you would be telling the government not to have a policy lever when it comes to local procurement, because there would simply be an open border: wherever procurement comes from, so be it.
Is it fair to say it in that way, or has there been a shift in the policy directive of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters?