Tariff barriers, as Roy said, tend to be low because we reduce them through multilateral efforts, but what we're hearing from a lot of our members is that when we're trying to do business in Europe we have some of the highest gross margins. In other words, it's a market that will pay a premium for quality and for good Canadian-made goods. However, tariffs that are sometimes at around 4%, 5%, 6%, 7%, 8%, or 9% can really eat into your profit margins and turn a profitable situation into a loss.
With the non-tariff barriers, we're often dealing with regulatory barriers to trade. A lot of these barriers are in procurement markets; we have some information we have received from our members. By nature, these barriers tend to be complicated, but what we're looking for in some cases is more alignment or a mutual recognition of standards. There are certain industry sectors looking for that. For example, the chemical sector has been pushing for that, while in some other areas I think we respectfully understand that we have different standards and there's not necessarily a need to harmonize them or have them be mutually recognized.
I don't have a lot of time, and it's not easy to summarize technical barriers to trade, but I think that by and large we're talking about regulatory barriers to trade. We want to make sure that there's more of a science-based approach to some of these things, because in many instances what we've seen is Canadian companies being shut out of markets because they've changed a rule and a couple of European companies can qualify. So having an effective dispute resolution mechanism is one thing, but having a mechanism for dealing with some of those regulatory barriers is important as well.