Mr. Chair, I appreciate your authority, but I want to respond very briefly.
I will confess to agreeing with much of the preamble that Mr. Davies provided in his last comments on how important this agreement is and why it's important. I certainly couldn't agree more, as it opens up the Asian market and there are opportunities that it creates.
However, I don't see the leap from there to the need to be so prescriptive about an annual mission. Certainly we want to do everything we can to ensure that Canadian companies have the chance to benefit, but we need to have the ability over time to be flexible with the various circumstances that arise. He even pointed that we want to have access to further Asian markets, and that may in itself necessitate that the focus be on some of those markets.
Although he's right that it's an important agreement, on the need to be so prescriptive about an annual mission, I don't see the leap from the preamble to that.
I appreciate his comments.
As far as Ms. Liu's comments, I think that market access issues like non-tariff barriers can best be addressed through institutional mechanisms like those that already exist in the agreement. I don't see the necessity for that in this amendment.