Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome, Ambassador. It is always a pleasure to have Colombians in the room. We have spent a lot of time at this table over the bilateral free trade agreement with Colombia. It was a long and tortuous process at times, but we finally were successful with it.
So congratulations, and congratulations on your posting.
A couple of questions stand out. Number one, I think it deserves a bit of a comment on what happened with the Doha Round. Really, it was not that other countries had a self-fulfilling prophecy in the Doha Round; it was the fact that Doha had stalled completely. The reality is that many countries in Doha had changed from emerging economies to mature economies and still wanted to be treated as emerging economies. There were huge advantages to that in the Doha Round.
The difficulty of trying to get everyone in the WTO on one page proved impossible. I agree with you that it would be great, if we could, to get it back on track, but it doesn't look as though that's going to happen any time soon. That is what forced countries such as Colombia and Canada to seek first of all bilateral relations and then stronger trading relations, to counterbalance some of these other agreements.
If you compare the Pacific Alliance with the TPP, the latter is much bigger, but it's also going to be, I suspect, much more difficult. I see comments in the paper suggesting that it may be done in the next year. I think that would be ambitious—I would be welcome, but extremely ambitious. Here, by contrast, we have an example of the Pacific Alliance, and if all the countries joined, we could have the eighth largest economy in the world.
The advantages to that for Canada are huge. We would be trading with many traditional trading partners, but trading partners with whom we already have bilateral agreements. We have already settled a large number of obstacles in those bilateral agreements. So it would make sense that to go to this more plurilateral agreement would be advantageous not just for Colombia but for Canada as well.
Specifically, what do you see as the greatest advantages to Colombia of the Pacific Alliance?