Thank you, Mr. Easter.
China is a huge market. It's hard to generalize. When it comes to natural resources and commodities, as you say, really the Chinese will buy as much as we have to supply, to put it very crudely. For us, the concern is the commodity prices rather than the amount of demand.
We have been in a super cycle, if you will, for a number of years now, which has been very good for many parts of the country and has brought great wealth to Canada. But commodity prices go up and down, and it's important that we not rely solely on the natural resource sector.
My view of the emerging opportunity in China is in the services sector, which I think is an area where Canada has great potential and great expertise.
Let me just back up a little bit to say that the big sector between commodities and services is, of course, manufacturing. Generally speaking, we haven't done very well in terms of manufacturing exports to China. Of course Bombardier is successful. We've had a bunch of telecom companies that sell equipment to China, but by and large we haven't had the success that the Europeans, even the Germans, the French, the Italians, or the Americans have.
Our auto parts and automotive sector has been absent from China until fairly recently because of the exclusive focus on the North American market. We just haven't had the kind of presence in China that other countries have had. That's partly because we don't have a large manufacturing sector to start with.
I believe that as the Chinese increasingly move towards more domestic demand-driven growth, if they try to improve the quality of life of their citizens, they are going to look towards an expansion of the services sector—retail, distribution, education, professional services, all the things that go into the quality of life. This is where I think we have great potential, and where I think that, if we are able to negotiate an agreement with China that gives us preferential access in some of these service areas, we can actually leapfrog over the competition.