The short answer is yes. Steve Verheul, Canada’s chief trade negotiator, has actually been quite open to and quite welcoming of input by industry. To our association, to CERT, and to several others I think he's gone out of his way to make himself available. Obviously he wants to get as good a deal as possible for Canada.
There are some challenges in getting companies to provide input in negotiations. You're right to say that most of our members are small and medium-sized manufacturers. I think Canada is pretty active on the trade negotiation front right now, and in hindsight we're starting to think about maybe resurrecting some of the older structures that were in place in order to get broader industry input on a regular basis.
As you know, we're negotiating with India. We've concluded negotiations with a number of countries. We need to develop--because of what Roy was explaining--our bilateral trade agenda. Government is doing that very actively, but I think it puts a stress on businesses to provide meaningful input. In many cases, what industry and companies need to do is assess how these agreements and how these negotiations could potentially impact their sectors.
So the short answer is that the negotiators and the entire negotiating team have been quite good in welcoming and inviting industry input, but that shouldn't stop us from thinking about how we can ensure we get better business engagement, better business input, into trade negotiations--not just this one, but the entire government trade agenda.
I mean, your government has been putting a lot at stake on opening up markets for Canadian exporters. We welcome that, but we need to make sure that we get really good input from our members and from all companies across Canada if we want these agreements to be of maximum benefit to the Canadian economy.