Well, there are two or three things.
Just to pick up from earlier, CIBC put out a report. The last decade was a lost decade for exports. One of our largest exports is gold to the U.K. Then you could take out energy from our export performance.
I'll give another example. Fifty companies, led by Boeing, account for 50% of U.S. exports. When you look at U.S. agreements and all of that, some very big powerful companies guide U.S. trade policy, which means that a vast number of smaller companies don't even export to a neighbour. In new technologies, whatever, we—Canadian companies, and smaller provinces as well—have to become engaged in exporting.
What Michael didn't quite refer to is that when we did the bilateral deal, we were a multilateral country, and so was Japan—the European round up to the Kennedy round setting up the GATT, and then the WTO. We were a multilateral country, because small countries.... Don't forget that Canada, roughly, has the same population as 20 cities in Asia—Shanghai, Tokyo, Osaka, or whatever. We're a small open economy, whereas there's this big group called the United States, and a collective Europe, which may not be so collective.
We knew from day one, and that was part of the negotiating team, that the bilateral deal between U.S. and Canada would be consistent with that of the WTO and would add to it by covering a number of areas, including dispute settlement.
I think the Canada-Japan negotiation can become a model on a number of issues, including intellectual property, which will guide us in future negotiations. These two conferences were very high level and specific, and whatever. The good news about Canada-Japan is that they're complementary economies, and we don't grow rice. So these really sticky problems on the Japanese side, let's say, don't affect us.
In a lot of cases, we have complementary issues—autos, for example. One really good area where we're in the driver's seat if we play our cards right is energy, including alternative energy. Hydro-Québec has operations in Japan, and the Caisse de dépôt invests in Japan. The Japanese have gone through a lot. They are sitting on $12 trillion, and they're only now getting back into the stock market.
The problem with the TPP is that.... Take the rice thing. There are rice equivalents in a lot of these developed countries. One example would be textiles. The governments want to protect the textile trade because they need the jobs. Vietnam is a communist country. They need the jobs. There's a problem in China. They need the jobs to protect their position in the government. So they're not going to allow intellectual property, or whatever. With the TPP, the problem is that there's going to be a massive number of exemptions, and it's going to be a son-of-a-b of a problem getting that agreement through the Congress, even if you had a mandate.