Everything you've said is absolutely right. We have 13 provincial and territorial governments, each with their own regulations across a wide range of areas, industrial, agricultural, and so on, and that is the world that everybody, every manufacturer, every grower or exporter, has to deal with. In some areas--and we were touching on it when I think Mr. Gowland mentioned the low-level issue--there are international standards. So in that context, I gather from his testimony, something is being developed on food products and food safety at the Codex Alimentarius, which is the UN agency based in Rome.
We have ISO standards in a bunch of areas, and the way the technical standards world works is that quite often countries will adopt a version of the international standard and tweak it here and there for local needs or for whatever reason they think is important. But there's no question it's a spaghetti bowl, and manufacturers routinely have to adapt product to different communities, different standards, different packaging and labelling requirements.
We have bilingual labelling. Every American and European manufacturer that makes a consumer product that comes to Canada has to have a separate line to run and package the Canadian-destined product. In Spain it's different. In Latin America it's different. In Brazil it's different yet again. So that is the reality.
I'm talking about labelling, but it doesn't say anything about the actual technical standards for electrical standards, for example. We have a Canadian electrical code that is designed by the CSA, but each province has adopted a slightly different version of it. Again, it's something that over time tends to—“harmonize” is perhaps the wrong word--converge, so that manufacturers ultimately make a product or aim to make a product that will satisfy multiple standards.
Are we going to harmonize with the United States for the European Union and are the 27 member states of the European Union going to harmonize on a range of issues? On a range of issues, they already have. The EU has directives across the range of consumer and other products where they've said this is the European standard and these standards can be departed from here and there for one's own particular purposes, but they must be met Europe-wide and the other EU countries' standards must be accepted. So it's a bit of a spaghetti bowl, but that's the spaghetti bowl manufacturers and exporters have to deal with.
Your second question, on regulatory cooperation, goes to the point I was trying to make in my opening testimony, which is too often.... Sorry, let me back up. The aim of regulatory cooperation in this trade agreement, and I hope in future trade agreements, isn't to impose a one-size-fits-all uniform, technical standard across a range of subjects. It's to create mechanisms that allow the regulators to take into account what the inadvertent impacts will be on our trading partners and on our own manufacturers who are trying to export into foreign markets of imposing a standard that is completely out of whack with either international standards or key trading partner standards.
In other words, it's not a mechanism to force harmonization. There may not be any harmonization on anything. It's a mechanism to allow enough communication to know in advance that if the CFIA, the Food Inspection Agency, goes in this direction or if Health Canada under the Hazardous Products Act does or the Europeans under their REACH chemical regulations go over here, we will have mechanisms to flag potential issues that will have trade effects.
So that's what we're talking about, not an across-the-board, wholesale harmonization, but wholesale harmonization in some areas is on the table and there are areas where we have negotiated through the ISO process, sometimes through voluntary standards that industries have adopted. Industry standards are now commonly accepted around the world; other areas, like emission standards, are less accepted.