Again, thank you for the opportunity to speak today.
My name is Brad Michnik. I work as the senior vice-president with the Saskatchewan Trade and Export Partnership, or STEP, as we're commonly known.
My organization is a public-private partnership between the Government of Saskatchewan and the Saskatchewan exporting community. It's a member-based organization. We currently have a membership that exceeds 400 Saskatchewan companies, each of which has a vested interest in international trade and exports.
My organization provides a variety of services to assist those companies to build their businesses and markets around the world across many industry sectors. We're not a lobby or advocacy group but we are often asked to gather input from Saskatchewan exporters, which is used to make trade policy decisions in the areas of international business, market access, trade promotion services, geographic market and sector priorities, trade agreements, and so on.
I guess as an opening, and in general, I can unequivocally state that STEP and our membership of Saskatchewan exporters support any initiatives that opens new markets, lessens regulatory environments and levels playing fields in the marketplace, reduces tariff and non-tariff barriers, and results in any reductions of any unreasonable impediments that can restrict business.
We believe the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement will see many positive benefits for Saskatchewan exports. We feel it's important that Canada ratify the TPP so that the agreement can be implemented as soon as possible.
We're a province that's abundant in many resources, and we've certainly developed a strong and diversified economy. This has been achieved by developing products and industries to support our agricultural and resource industries. Many were built for the local market, but we found that there are also markets around the world. We work with many very outward-looking companies that provide products, technologies, and services that support agriculture, mining, and oil and gas industries.
Beyond our strength in resources, we also have an economy that's diversified in areas such as manufacturing, information and communications technology, environmental products and services, industrial goods, building products, and so on.
We're absolutely dependent on international trade. Saskatchewan continues to have one of the highest percentages of exports as a percentage of GDP of any region in the world.
Certainly, greater access to world markets through the TPP and other trade agreements aligns with what Saskatchewan is all about. It's safe to say that the markets in the Americas and Asia are of the utmost importance to Saskatchewan exporters, and we see tremendous opportunities for our resources and our value-added products and services throughout the TPP region.
The STEP board of directors, which is composed of 12 senior executives of Saskatchewan exporting firms plus three senior-level government employees, wholeheartedly endorsed support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership at their third-quarter board meeting on December 3, 2015. In follow up of that, STEP's board did in fact write a letter to Minister Freeland in support of the TPP agreement.
Following this, in January 2016 we hosted a round table with Mr. David Lametti, who is the parliamentary secretary to Minister of International Trade Chrystia Freeland. The event was organized to elicit feedback on the TPP from Saskatchewan stakeholders. It was attended by over 25 prominent member companies and industry organizations who unanimously supported the TPP, stressing the many benefits it would bring to their businesses and the Saskatchewan economy in the areas of increased trade, diversification, markets, competitive factors that would come into play being a signatory or a non-signatory, intellectual property protection, setting the ground rules for trade disputes, and so on. These are all reasons that this trade agreement needs to happen from that group's perspective.
Our exports to the other 11 TPP countries in 2015 totalled just over $20 billion, which amounts to 61% of our exports. Not surprisingly, a large percentage of that—54%—goes to the United States. But the one nuance to this is that for Canada as a whole, I think about 77% of Canadian exports go to the United States; for Saskatchewan it's 54%. I think our province has done a good job of diversifying our markets, which is certainly important to anybody's strategies when you're building your exports or your book of business. We see that the TPP really continues down that path of diversifying markets for Saskatchewan exports.
TPP would limit tariffs in most of our key exports from the province and provide new opportunities in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, southeast Asia. The main trade advantages we see are in such areas as duty-free market access for industrial goods, including metals, materials, and agricultural equipment—key industries in our province—duty-free access for most agricultural and agrifood products, including feed wheat, feed barley, canola seed and oils, dried peas, as well as enhanced market access for food wheat, food barley, and malt; duty-free access for wood and other forestry products, including lumber and oriented strand board; and more transparent and critical access for service suppliers in key sectors, such as construction and R and D services.
As well, there are the general predictability, non-discriminatory rules for Canadian investors when they're investing in the markets that they need to do business in.