Ill take the last one first.
I'll go back to Monsieur Morin, who is concerned with how other countries might look at Canada's getting into this, that, or the other thing.
I agree with Carlo that it's not a major thing in this case, but as a person who has spent most of his life in marketing and selling that kind thing, I like to pursue opportunities. When you have an opportunity, when people are inviting you to come and talk to them, I think that's a positive thing.
Canada has to ensure that it maintains as high a profile as possible in terms of various aspects of our performance here in this country, including the mining industry. I believe that working with people is the best way to explain what's happening in Canada, what Canadian values are, and so on.
When I see a group of four countries trying to standardize things, that standardization alone would be an advantage to our exporters, even if they do it and we're outside of it. If they did it with us inside the group, with some opportunity to advance our ways of doing things, I think it would be advantageous.
To me it's not this or that; it's that we have an opportunity here, and we should go forward.
I will agree with you that there are a lot of issues on the trade side. Of course I'm not party, as you are, to this committee's deliberations as they go on. I just advance the idea that we're not doing very much on what I might call sectoral approaches to export trade and export marketing.
It's great to sign agreements with countries and then walk away and say, “Okay, let business do it”, but I think we need a little bit more consolidation of Canadian efforts when we go into these countries, particularly sector by sector, to try to actually sell things.
It's great to have agreements on paper, but you're not going to get a dollar coming back to this country until you have actually had a competent salesperson meet a competent buyer, and something actually gets sold. That's where we're slow.