Well, it certainly doesn't keep Korean product out of Canada. We import around 100,000 vehicles from Korea. All of my numbers about the imbalance with Korea are not about Korean-branded vehicles. They are about Korean-made vehicles. Yes, there are Korean-branded vehicles made within North America that come into Canada tariff-free. One of the structural imbalances between us and Korea is that the Korean firms have no FDI presence here in Canada at all. They have located in Mexico or the deep south of the United States. It actually makes things worse that they're coming in both from Korea and from other regions of NAFTA. There's no intention on the part of Korean automakers to put any direct investment or direct production into Canada at all and, most disappointingly, there's no effort by Canadian trade negotiators to do so.
In some of our earlier submissions to the federal government regarding the Korean negotiations, we suggested that they deal with the Koreans and make their tariff-free access to Canada's market contingent on Hyundai and Kia getting at least some kind of footprint in place to proportionately reflect their share of the Canadian market. They have a 12% market share now, but of course that was not taken up by our negotiators. Just keeping the 6.1% tariff alone is not a solution to the problem. The problem we have today has arisen in the wake of that tariff. We need, I think, a deeper effort to develop export-oriented capacity in high-value industries, including auto but not just limited to auto. We need the ability to bargain with countries like Korea and say, “Look, this cannot be a one-way street. In strategic industries like auto, like telecommunications equipment, like computers and circuits, we have to have reciprocity. We will not satisfy ourselves with shipping you resources that you transform into very expensive products that you sell back to us.”
That would be the ultimate solution. But eliminating the 6.1% tariff isn't going to make things better. It's going to make them incrementally worse, locking in the current imbalance.