Thank you to the presenters.
I think what my colleague is expressing is the difficulty of this. To answer Mr. Tingey's question, we do not have an economic impact assessment. We don't have that to guide the work we're doing here, so while we hear people sitting in front of us say that this is good for their industry or that this is is not good for other aspects of Canadians' lives, on balance we have nothing to base that on, other than a Tufts University study that tells us we'll see 58,000 jobs lost out of Canada.
That's on balance. That's taking into account the industries we'll lose and the industries we'll gain: 58,000 jobs lost and a 0.02% gain in our GDP by 2030. In today's Globe and Mail, there is an article from the C.D. Howe Institute saying essentially the same thing, that there will not be a net gain for Canada in the TPP.
Also, we aren't here to renegotiate. We can't negotiate. We have to deal with what we have.
Here's what I'd like to go back to. What I'd like to say is that the TFW program we currently have is far from ideal, but there are provisions in place to limit what is able to happen under that program. We can change it. We can fix it. If we enter into the TPP, that will not be the case. We cannot change it. We cannot go back and try to legislate. As parliamentarians, we cannot go back to our ministry of labour to try to improve the conditions that we will sign on to in the TPP. I want to note that the U.S. is not included in this annex. The U.S. opted out because they didn't want to subject their immigration policies to binding international treaties. It's an issue of sovereignty.
I'd like you to speak to that. Now we have an imbalance with the U.S., because they're not even part of this provision that will see an inflow of workers.