Well, just on the last part first, I'm hesitant to make specific predictions because in a negotiation you never quite know what's going to happen. You get hung up on an issue and everything changes entirely. We have been committing, as has the European Union, to completing negotiations by the end of the year. I certainly think we're on track to do that.
As for the timing, I don't want to assign specific blame to my trading partners, but I would say that they are in a somewhat different position than we are. We are a single country and would have a lot of support from provinces and territories behind us, but they are trying to negotiate deals on behalf of 27 individual sovereign countries.
We have asked them to do things that they've never done before, such as the negative list approach on services and investment. It is taking an enormous amount of time to go back to member states and have them check with their subnational governments and their municipalities. It's a long, painful process to do that. We are also needing to go through the kinds of rules of origin issues that I mentioned, where you have to go product by product, and they often have to go back and check with member states that are the largest producers of those products to get a reaction.
So I would say that the greater complexity on the EU side has meant that they are not able to move as quickly as we can in the negotiations. Its services and investment reservations have taken longer than we would have expected. Our rules of origin discussions have taken longer than we would have expected. But clearly we've been ready for this all along and are prepared to finish as quickly as the European Union can.