Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Ms. Hillman and Ms. Theodore, for coming. It's very welcome to have some of our professional civil service members who are involved on the ground with these negotiations. We appreciate your time and your being here.
I do have to comment on my friend Mr. Morin who spoke positively about supporting trade and treaties that are good for Canada. Most MPs get bombarded with a lot of emails that really try to spread misinformation with respect to trade.
In fact, each of the NDP members of the trade committee sponsored these emails or are part of websites called MPs for Transparency and all of these things. So, having officials involved in the negotiations here to dispel the myth that there's some secret agenda happening is not only welcome.
The most recent email that all MPs received as part of these email campaigns said that “there is no justification for negotiating” with the countries of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I think your presentation was helpful because you showed exactly why there's a justification for being at the table. I'm going to use my short period of time to talk about that justification and I'll be sending this exchange back to the forces, the Council of Canadians and others, who try to really cause mischief and misinformation.
Your second part, I think, was the most critical in terms of rule setting. This is a market of 800 million—give or take—consumers representing a significant portion of the world economy and, if we're not setting the rules of trade for the generation to come, Canada will be a loser and our economy will suffer.
I'd like to you to just talk a little bit more about the rule setting and if possible to talk about the services aspect to Canada's economy. Often we think of trade as selling cars or resources, those sorts of things, but services account for 70% of Canada's GDP and 14 million Canadian jobs. Modern trade agreements like the CETA and others take into consideration the exchange of services and professional mobility, those sorts of things. Could you speak about that as part of the rule-setting process for the TPP?