Mr. Chair, it's a very interesting question. Certainly, the emergence of global value chains and the strengthening of them in the last few years is something that the Canadian government and other governments around the world are grappling with and trying to analyze, and the Canadian business community is competing in that world every day now.
I don't have briefs in front of me to support a lot more than to say that clearly, in terms of the percentage of global trade of intermediate products for further processing in the next country that are then processed and re-exported to the next country, this kind of trade is growing in importance. The WTO and the OECD have done some interesting work just in the last few months on global value chains and so-called value-added trade, and how analyzing trade balances through the perspective of value-added can actually change the numbers that they produce in terms of surplus or deficit here or there.
I gave the example before of gold. There's the famous example of how iPods imported into the United States from China may appear to be, let's hypothesize, a $300 import from China, when in fact, only about $50 worth of the value is actually added in China and the rest is from components that are imported into China from the rest of the world. It's a very complicated question. It's a very important question, I agree. I think the chief economist's office is beginning to do some work here, and there are other policy institutes and think tanks in Canada, the C.D. Howe Institute and the Conference Board and others, that are looking at these questions.