I'd like to thank our guests for being here.
Frankly, if those public consultations had been in the great riding area of Mississauga, obviously my colleague would have been part of that as well.
I might say, Mr. Onuoha, that if for any reason Mississauga doesn't fulfill all your requirements, the great city of London, Ontario, the 10th largest city in Canada, which is just down the road, would be more than pleased to absorb any excess R and D that you do.
Mr. Van Harten, welcome back to our committee.
You remind me a bit of my Cape Breton mom. In a real sense, my thought of her was that no matter how much she knew about a subject she had an opinion on it. That was my mom. You have a lot of opinions. The reason I bring that up is you said that without the text you can't say much, but my God, you sure said a lot.
I have a couple of questions, if you'd allow me, please.
I found it very interesting and very reasoned in terms of your approach, at least the tenor of your dialogue, but something you said actually quite surprised me. It's not the part where you said that you'd like to eliminate non-tariff barriers. Quite true. I might add there probably isn't one guest of ours, one witness who hasn't come forward that would say, “We'd love to eliminate non-tariff barriers.”
That always becomes the tricky part, because what we can do at the legal end, if you will, and the contractual end is do those kinds of things, and if we don't have some kind of a dispute settlement mechanism to try to reduce the impact of those non-tariff barriers...because those are the most insidious ones I think for any country, frankly, and for any business that's trying to do business. I say this as a business person; it's the most challenging part.
The question I have for you is on something that probably struck me most of all. You were talking about dealings with claim arbitrators. You made reference to challenging their judicial independence in your first series of comments and questions. You said because they were appointed the way they were that there was a bias in their judgment. I think this is really critical, as it gets to the credibility of arbitrators. Do you have any specific proof? I ask this as a sincere question to you. Do you have any specific proof that arbitrators have biased their judgments on a claim because that arbitrator was appointed? Do you have a specific reference you can make to that?