Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the international trade committee.
This is our fourth and final leg on our western tour. We started in British Columbia on Monday, we were in Alberta on Tuesday, and yesterday we were in Saskatchewan. Today we're in Manitoba.
Our committee is very active and has a lot on our plate. We're dealing with the tidying up of the CETA, the European agreement, and we have softwood lumber. But our main focus now is the TPP, which as everybody knows is a really big deal. It's a trillion-dollar trade deal. It's big, and it affects almost everybody in Canada to a certain extent, whether you're buying products, selling products, or you have services. It's very important that we reach out to Canadians and stakeholders and hear what they have to say about it. It's a very big document; there are 6,000 pages. Very few have gone right through it, but what we hear is most individuals or groups focus pretty well in the document where it has an impact on them, for sure.
After we do the western tour we're going to go back to Ottawa for a week, and then we'll do central Canada, and then we'll follow up in the fall and we'll do eastern Canada. Also, we'll reach out to the territories through Skype to Ottawa to make sure we have every area covered. Besides that, we are also going to take submissions. I don't know if we're popular, or TPP is very popular—either way, positive or negative—but there's a big uptake in interest in that, so our committee is opening up to any individual who wants to make a submission. We extended the deadline until the end of June, and our analysts are going to digest all that through the summer. We'll have to come back in the fall and look at those submissions that were received. I think we're over 10,000 right now, and it's growing. Also, members of Parliament are going to reach out to their constituents to see what they have to say.
It is quite a bit, between going through the draft report and translation, but we're hoping to have this done before the end of the year and to present it to members of Parliament in the House of Commons where they will have a sense of the report and how they will vote in the future on the agreement.
Our committee consists of members from right across the country. From the farthest west, from British Columbia, we have Mr. Dhaliwal; from Saskatchewan we have Mr. Hoback, who is not with us today, but also Mr. Ritz from Saskatchewan; and today joining us is Larry Maguire. Welcome. We're in your home province and it's good to be here. It's good to see you here, sir. From Ontario we have four members. Mr. Van Kesteren is from southern Ontario, and Ms. Ramsey from the NDP is also from the Windsor area. From the Toronto area we have Mr. Peterson and Mr. Fonseca. From the Atlantic coast, besides me being from Cape Breton, we have Mrs. Ludwig from New Brunswick. Also, as part of our committee we have two members from Quebec. Mr. Lametti is the parliamentary secretary, and Madam Lapointe is also from Quebec.
We have a broad group. We usually have three or four panels each day. It depends on the panel. Sometimes we have three witnesses, sometimes four.
On that note, we're going to start off. With us we have three groups. We have Canola Council of Canada, Cereals Canada, and Manitoba Pulse & Soybean Growers. We're going to start off with the Canola Council. Ms. Miller, you have the floor for five minutes. Go ahead.