As I mentioned earlier, the manufacturing sector has more at stake than anyone else in these negotiations. The fact that the main Canadian exports to Japan are natural resource products shows that Richard and his mining sector and natural resources sector members have done excellent work to penetrate that market. Japan certainly needs to import natural resources because of its small size and its fairly considerable needs. The question is knowing how to make sure we can also export products that are higher up in the chain, such as manufactured products and services. We have here some representatives of Manulife Financial, who work in the service industry.
As I was saying, we are not claiming Canada should not export natural resources to Japan. We rather think that we should diversify our exports to Japan. In theory, a free trade agreement could help us diversify our exports, provided that this agreement addresses the main concerns of other sectors of the economy, including ours, which are facing barriers. We are talking about non-tariff barriers.
I would like to talk about one of the obstacles our members face. When they want to penetrate a foreign market, they don't necessarily want to begin exporting directly from Canada. Therefore, they decide to acquire a company in another market. That often happens in the United States. In fact, a company buys a competitor—in other words, a company from the same sector in another market. It is very difficult to do that in Japan. Manulife Financial seems to have done so in the 1990s, but that is an exception. There are many barriers, such as corporate governance rules that are very different in Japan. Much has been written about that. I know that, for companies, traditional ways of penetrating that market often do not work because of non-tariff structural barriers, regulatory barriers and other types of barriers. If a free trade agreement could address those concerns, that would be very good news for us.
However, as I was saying earlier, we will wait and see how the negotiations turn out. I think that the Japanese are negotiating in good faith, as are we. So there is a lot of potential, but at the same time, many questions remain.