Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome, Mr. Campbell, to committee.
Before I start my questions, I will take a moment to thank you for your long and illustrious career in the civil service and as ambassador to Japan certainly. It gives you an angle and an amount of expertise on this that a number of our witnesses did not have.
I want to revisit the closing of the trade consulate in Osaka. I appreciate your comments. They were straightforward and that's what we look for at committee. The challenge, of course, for all government is budgetary restraint, how you balance the books, and how you get out of this economic cycle we're in, and you mentioned that.
The visa process at the embassy in Tokyo should be faster, but the proof is in the pudding and we do need to see if it's going to be successful or not, but I truly believe it will be. Certainly we've moved to an online generation.
My real question for you is on trade. We've got all these complementary practices, and you mentioned a number of them. We've got a long relationship going back to 1929, and I'm sure the committee members who were in Japan saw it.
I've had the great pleasure of visiting Japan four or five times now. We have a fantastic brand that I don't think we take advantage of enough, quite frankly. We have a good supporter in Japan in a number of areas we may not suspect.
One of them, which I'm sure Mr. Easter would be interested in, is at the ICCAT meetings on the international treaty on tuna. Japan has been our ally from day one.
Canada exports at least 90% of the tuna we catch, whereas other countries, like the United States, would have enough consumption to consume the majority of tuna. Japan is probably our largest customer for tuna. Sometimes I think we overlook some of the smaller aspects of trade as being inconsequential, but they're extremely important to Canada. If it weren't for Japan's support at the last ICCAT meeting, we would be shut out of tuna exports anywhere in the world, let alone to Japan.
Could you comment on that? Sometimes it's the sidebar agreement, not the agreement itself, that actually gets you to the door.