Merci beaucoup.
To start off, there are lots of different reasons why Canada's trade performance has been below potential, and we don't want to say that trade promotion, economic diplomacy, is a panacea. It is one of the many tools we have available to get our trade back on track.
The efficiency of our transportation infrastructure, the efficiency of our customs administration, the productivity of Canadian businesses, our access to skills, all matter immensely to the competitiveness of Canadian companies.
Free trade agreements are an essential part of the solution. We need to crack open markets that have barriers at the borders. We need to lower tariffs to Canadian products. We need to protect Canadian investments in those markets.
What we have focused on in this report is the set of policy tools that essentially help businesses get in through the doors that are opened by free trade agreements. While we have a lot of the tools at our disposal, the point we are making is that these are not always being leveraged to their full potential. In some cases, the tools need to be sharpened, and in other cases we need to make sure we have certain tools that we currently don't have at our disposal.