I agree entirely. The TPP is very much being driven by our friends south of the border, who are determined to get what they call a gold standard WTO-plus agreement. You currently have nine members. With Canada and Mexico joining, you will have 11 members. They range in economic development from the giants like United States to a very new, emerging economy like Vietnam. It's going to be, and already is, a very difficult and lengthy negotiation. Japan has not yet taken the step to join those negotiations. Their Prime Minister did indicate in 2011 that they were going to, but he ran into political.... As you may have noticed, they are unlike Canada. They don't put any premium on political leadership. There were five different prime ministers when I was in Japan. I often thought when meeting some of them that they thought it was more important to have been a prime minister than to be a prime minister. Former prime ministers all remain in their Diet, their Parliament.
What all of this says to me is that we should pursue as intensively as possible the Canada-Japan bilateral agreement. We should also pursue the TPP. However, they may end up on different timeframes and on different tracks, with different percentages of possibility for success.