Welcome to the eighth meeting of this session of the Standing Committee on International Trade.
As a committee we are anticipating a bill to come to us from Parliament. I don't know if we're particularly presumptuous, but that's usually the way these things go. To properly prepare the committee for that legislative function, we are asking the department today for a briefing on Canada-Jordan matters generally, but this is all to the end of what we presumed to be a free trade agreement coming this way.
We have had most of these witnesses here before and we're grateful that they've come back to get us started down this path. We're going to follow our normal practice of allowing an opening statement, just by way of briefing, but we find that a lot of the questions the members want to know come out of the questions and answers. So we'll do a seven-minute round after questions. Because we are about 10 minutes late starting, we'll go the full hour here, if that's all right with our witnesses.
I will begin by introducing Don Stephenson, the assistant deputy minister of trade policy and negotiations. He has been with us before. We also have Doug George with us. He's the director of bilateral market access. We have Ton Zuijdwijk, the general counsel with market access and trade remedies in the law division. We have Thomas Marr here as well, acting director general, Middle East and Nagreb.
From the Department of Human Resources and Skills Development, we have Pierre Bouchard. Welcome back. Thank you again for being here.
And from the Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food, we have Denis Landreville, lead negotiator, regional agreements, negotiations and multilateral trade policy directorate.
With that introduction, I take it, Mr. Stephenson, you're going to begin with a brief overview.