Thank you very much.
We've prepared a lot of background information and given you a link to a study that's several hundred pages long. What I'd like to touch on in the opening remarks are some of the developments in the TPP, and then I'll answer in advance a couple of questions you might ask.
Is the TPP valuable to Canada? Yes, it is. It's valuable as a bridge to Asia, not so much for trade among the participating countries at the present time other than Japan, where we have another negotiation going on in parallel, hopefully a little more advanced than the one for the TPP.
The bridge to Asia is very important. My view of trade agreements is that you shouldn't look at them the way a corporation looks at its quarterly reports. You have to take the long-term view.
When I'm asked whether with CETA we are getting beaten up a little bit, yes, we are, but we shouldn't be looking at the CETA for now or next year or two years from now. We should be looking at it in terms of decades, because we're building a structure that is eventually going to lead to the various big groups around the world coming together to do something that the WTO hasn't been able to do, which is to create true global free trade.
I think Canada really doesn't have any choice but to support that. We're an exporting country. We're a trading country, and we have to be there.
Dealing with the TPP, I've been on the record as saying the TPP isn't really very interesting for Canada without Japan. That's because we have agreements with everybody on this side of the Pacific, and the countries on the other side, with the exception of Vietnam, are pretty small. I've come before this committee previously to talk about our negotiations in South America and Latin America, and I described those as looking for love in all the wrong places—an awful lot of effort for very small markets.
So now we're going after the bigger fish. I think the negotiations with Japan are very important, and I think we're going to have to get on board with the Pacific Alliance fairly quickly.
Will the TPP be finished in October? Nobody really thinks so, not even the people close to President Obama. He has a habit, every time there's going to be a new leaders' summit for APEC, of setting that as the next date. Well, you don't set final dates according to photo ops. Maybe he does, but nobody who's negotiating does.
I do see changes coming. When we were asked back in December whether we thought there would be a TPP, I said what you're really looking at here and what you're looking at in Europe is that these negotiations—notwithstanding all the hype about comprehensive nature, no exclusions, and all that nonsense—are really about exclusions.
Why do I see more hope for the TPP now? Because the Americans are now consulting with their stakeholders. They're asking their stakeholders whether they could redefine their priorities in these negotiations. That means they're going to be backing off some of their more serious demands. But from our perspective if we want to get something out of this deal, there are certain American exclusions that have been there from the beginning that we have to be very wary of and we have to get at.
Our negotiators are first rate. We talk to them fairly often. They can't talk to me about the TPP for some reason because I write columns for iPolitics from time to time or National Newswatch, and we journalists can't be trusted.