Sure, I completely agree and understand what it is that you're saying with regard to FTAs that we're currently negotiating and the ones that we've signed. I.E. Canada has testified many times before this committee and various Senate committees to say that we support free trade overall. The difference is not the free agreement that we negotiate at an international table with an international partner such as the CETA, or Honduras that we just finished with, or Japan or India, or any of the ones that we're working on. What I'm talking about is the import policy that is applied here domestically, on the ground, by Canadian bureaucrats.
Just to give you an example, there are a number of Canadian companies that import what you and I, and I'm sure anybody in your family would point to on a table and say that's a pickle. It's a glass jar with a metal lid. The contents of the glass jar are clear and it's very clear what the contents of the jar are and that they are pickles. I won't go into all the excruciating details, but pickles have one rate of duty, cucumbers in brine have a different rate of duty, and it's a higher rate of duty. Our domestic bureaucrats have put a number of Canadian companies through what I'm going to call administrative discomfort, by reclassifying something that anybody on the street would say is a pickle and reclassifying it as cucumbers in brine.
That has nothing to do with the free trade agreement that we negotiate with a foreign country; that has everything to do with how we interpret our own import policy here, boots on the ground, in Canada. There needs to be some comprehensive political and senior level bureaucratic oversight over the import policies that are enacted, juxtaposed against something like the GMAP and the free trade agreements that you were referencing.
I don't know if that exactly answers your question, but that's the first example I can think of.