As you well know, agricultural trade is often the sticking point for some of these negotiations, and there are obviously other areas for Canada. Automobiles come to mind in the negotiations with Japan and the like.
But this is clearly a difficult area, and this is really what has kept Japan out of the game of bilateral agreements, in many cases for a long time. There has been an emphasis on multilateral agreements instead. In fact, I suspect that from the point of view of the ministries most supportive of the liberalization of international trade—and that's primarily METI , the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and this has been the case for some politicians as well—these negotiations are a way of trying to say to agricultural interests that they need to be stepping away from these tariff barriers because it's hurting them in other areas.
As I mentioned before, I think the hurdles are lower in the negotiations with Canada than they are with some other cases, including Australia. This will obviously be a difficult issue for the negotiators to address, and will also be a task for politicians to engage with stakeholders such as agricultural producers. But perhaps the hurdles are lower in the Canada–Japan link than they are in other cases.