Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to all who have come.
It is rather insightful. Everyone seems to say the same thing and not just sort of go back to where Mr. Laforest started about this data.
What Mr. Hammoud has talked about is in a way typical of the data we do not have. His company is being stretched on both sides of the border to be competitive with an agreement he thought helped him.
I hate to use the old axiom that this is a bit of a pig in a poke, but we don't know what we have. We don't know what we can get. We don't know, it seems to me from some perspective--and in fact the department said they didn't know how much they could actually go and find. They didn't know how big it was in the first place. They didn't even know how much interest we had on our side.
It reminds me of going to a bargaining table, when I used to do that, without knowing what I was going to ask for. Here I am representing 4,000 members, and they're looking to me to go to the bargaining table and ask the employer for something, and I don't know what to ask for. It almost reminds me of that.
We should have known or at least had a sense of what we wanted, other than open access. We got open access. Did that help Mr. Hammoud? Did it help other small businesses? We don't know.
We are taking it on in the sense that it will, but we don't know how to measure that. I agree that it's difficult, but we need to find a way to measure it. In other instances, when we looked at other trade agreements, we had a sense of how much benefit there would be. I remember the NAFTA debate about how many hundreds of thousands of jobs were going to be created. As for whether they were created or not, that is a different debate, but we said those sorts of things.
With this agreement, we can't say that. We don't know. If that's the case, is this just a feel-good thing so that we can talk to them later about feeling good again about something? I agree with what Mr. Cannan said earlier. There are 50 U.S. states with all kinds of different levels of government. Mr. Hammoud has pointed out quite clearly that they don't get it. We didn't get it. We got it the opposite way in Ontario. The folks I talked to at the municipal level thought that NAFTA said they had an open market. That wasn't true.
Here we had the Canadian municipal governments thinking the total opposite of what the American municipal governments were thinking, that we had an open border with NAFTA and they had to take the lowest bidder. They couldn't say, “No, I just want to buy from a Canadian at a sub-national level.” It's the opposite in the United States.
How do you ever break down that barrier, and how do you make it workable so that we actually get something?
From the Chamber's perspective, I know you said you're hoping to sort of drive some statistics in a year, Ms. George. I appreciate that's kind of the place you're going to be, trying to look back and take a snapshot of the history and figure out what it is.
One of the things I would like--and maybe you can tell me today whether you're going to do this--would be to get a sense of whether it was of benefit to the general economy and to Canadian workers. Did we generate jobs through this? Did small and medium enterprises actually generate jobs because of this open access?
That's one of the things I'd like to come back to see, because it's all wonderful that companies make money--and they should--but I need to see them create jobs as well. One of the things we need in this country is additional jobs. Their having a better bottom line without our creating more employment isn't really helpful for me and the folks I represent in my riding.