Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Mr. Sood, Mr. Madan, and Mr. McRonald for being here and lending us your expertise.
I want to start with the overall context. Although India was Canada's fifteenth-largest trade partner in 2012, it's not a major trading partner considering its population size and relatively rapid rate of economic growth, we're told.
To put some numbers around that, in 2012, if we just deal with merchandise trade and isolate that one factor, Canada-India merchandise trade totalled $5.2 billion, whereas Australia, a country similar to Canada in terms of its economy, geographic size, and population, had merchandise exports to India valued at $14.9 billion.
While we can account for that in terms of India and Australia's geographical proximity, Switzerland, a country whose GDP is approximately a third of Canada's and who is as geographically remote as us, had merchandise exports to India valued at $32.4 billion.
With those numbers, I'm wondering if any of you could help us understand what the main obstacles seem to be preventing Canada and India from raising those numbers, which I think all of us are interested in doing.
Mr. Sood.