Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome to our witnesses. I will be splitting my time with Mr. Holder. I know all my colleagues here have a number of questions they want to get on the record, so I'll try to be brief in my quick submission.
This is a great agreement, one on which the door of opportunity has opened, and we absolutely need to take advantage of it. I'm very pleased to hear we're moving expeditiously and you'll be in Japan on May 8.
Mr. Burney, there is one little irritant that's been there for a while. I think I've spoken to you and a number of your colleagues about it, and that is the paralytic shellfish poisoning regulations Japan has on Canadian lobster. We have an opportunity here to re-address that.
Quite frankly, what has happened is that our lobster is exported into the United States. The United States relabels it as American lobster and ships it in without any PSP restrictions.
This is a multi-million-dollar industry. We used to have 50-some exporters that sent lobsters to Japan; we now have two. Rhode Island, which is a very small state that wouldn't produce more than a couple of hundred two-and-a-half to three-pound lobsters—I might be exaggerating a little in that comment, but not a lot of lobsters of the size you want to ship to Japan—has increased its production by a thousandfold. That's all Canadian lobster that's being relabelled.
So if you could re-address that and have a chance to put that back on the table, I think it's extremely opportune.