That's true, yes. Notwithstanding the fact that the official secrets act that I signed when I was in the Department of Finance a long time ago is good for life, and I've been reminded about that.
In any event, it is coming together better, but we have problems with the way the Americans approach this. They've excluded the States from certain important parts of the deal.
They're playing a bit of a cagey game on market access with cumulation. When you have a plurilateral deal like this with 12 countries, you should be able to cumulate the content of each of the members to qualify for the rates. They're under a lot of pressure from Mexico, which doesn't want to buy candy and confectionery from Canada that's made with Australian sugar.
There are games like this going on that we have to be very careful of. I'm glad you're having these committee hearings because you're doing a major service to the country, exposing the issues that we need to deal with.
I'm concerned about the automotive industry. The Americans are doing their own negotiation with Japan, and I'm not sure we'll be able to get the same deal. This is one of the problems we had with Korea. We were nearly there. We stopped negotiating with them. Then the Americans got their deal and now the Koreans don't want to give us the same deal.
You have to face it, we're smaller. Why should they pay the same price for access to our market as they do for the United States?
These are the types of issues that you need to address. I'm happy to talk to you about any of these things, but I'm trying to set a framework. Number one, it's very important for Canada. Canada can't be left out of big deals. If we're not in there for offensive reasons.... Now you heard all kinds of good offensive reasons from the canola people, and I'm sure you'll hear them from my friend Richard as well.
What you're looking at in a trade agreement like this with preferences, and particularly when you have high tariffs, is playing a defensive game. It's far better to be inside the tent sharing the preferences than outside the tent and having people discriminating against you. That's just a basic fact of life in trade negotiations. When you look at Canada, we have to take a look at the size of the package compared to what we're offering because we are a relatively small market.
The last point I'd make is that everybody has problems and everybody tends to get them looked after if there's going to be a deal. The big problem with getting the deal with the United States is that even though they're diluting their ambition, and they're taking serious steps to dilute their ambition to try to get a deal sooner rather than later, the people who support it in Congress are the guys they are trying to dilute and they haven't spoken to Congress yet.
Mr. Easter was asking about people seeing copies of the text. Congress hasn't seen the text. They haven't seen the text, which I find hard to believe.
We were at Capitol Hill dealing with another issue for the Canadian pork industry and we asked them that specifically. They said they haven't seen the text. It's a funny way to run a railroad. In order to get fast-tracked in the United States, they have to go to Congress. Congress holds hearings, and Congress tells the negotiators how they want them to negotiate.
The big issue for them now is that because of the automotive industry and because of Japan, they want a permanency clause in the agreement, which is going to be very difficult to negotiate.
Now China is coming out of the woodwork. Hillary Clinton and somebody else suggested to them that maybe they should join the TPP. They said, “Well, yes, we'd like to join the TPP, but we want it to be more flexible. We want it to be more pragmatic and we want it to take account of differing stages of development.”
If China gets there, it will go longer than Doha.