Canada has made it clear on many different occasions within international fora that we believe the World Trade Organization should remain the preeminent forum within which rules-based trading takes place around the world. Sadly, the Doha Round is stalled very badly.
There are very significant efforts being brought to bear to try to come up with a meaningful outcome at MC9 in Bali, which is coming up in December. I'm part of that effort, as are many of my counterpart colleagues from around the world. In the absence of significant progress in the Doha Round, Canada has no option but to look at opportunities to remove tariff and non-tariff barriers through other means. We're talking about bilateral agreements, which I just discussed with Mr. Davies. We're talking about regional agreements, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I wouldn't want to forget plurilateral agreements. For example, Canada has recently joined in an international services agreement which is looking to liberalize the trade in services internationally. I believe there are 20 or 21 partners involved in that, including the EU, the U.S., and Japan.
The reason I am so excited about that initiative is that Canada is one of the world leaders in the sale of services. We're the fourth largest exporter of engineering services in the world. We're only a population of 34 million in a world population of 7 billion, and we're the fourth largest exporter of engineering expertise in the world. We're that way across many other sectors of the services market. However, we're prevented from taking maximum advantage of those opportunities because of non-tariff barriers in many parts of the world. We're hoping to eliminate, or certainly reduce, those barriers because we know Canada can really benefit from it going forward.
Finding ways to refresh the WTO is a significant challenge for the world's economy. When the Uruguay Round was finalized, there was great optimism that the next round, which was the Doha Round, would lead to a very significant step forward in further trade liberalization around the world. Sadly, what we've seen from many of the key players in the global economy is that there has been a lack of flexibility. These are my own words. This is my own assessment. There's a lack of flexibility in moving forward, because we have different groupings. We have least developed countries looking for outcomes that will serve their interests. There are developing economies looking for certain outcomes. There are the developed economies like Canada, the U.S., the EU, and Japan, which also are looking for certain outcomes.
As we look toward Bali, one of the key things we can do to facilitate trade around the world is to agree on a set of measures under trade facilitation that would remove things such as barriers within customs measures. That would allow us to leverage the strengths of economies by eliminating the barriers we have at the border. Many of those are artificial. Many of them, quite frankly, are essentially there to prevent trade from happening and to protect local economies. We in Canada have been a very strong voice against protectionism in the global economy. We believe protectionism is toxic to the economic recovery that all of us are hoping for in the global economy.
I hope that helps you to divine what our government is hoping to achieve within the larger multilateral context.