Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be back.
Good morning, Chair and honourable members. Thank you again for the invitation to speak with you today.
As many of you know, my name is Mark Agnew, our director of international policy. I'm joined by my colleague, Susanna Cluff-Clyburne, who's responsible for our SME file. She'll offer a perspective from her position.
Certainly trade agreements and helping our companies export is a priority at the Canadian chamber, so this is very much a topic near to our hearts.
We see trade agreements—CETA, CPTPP and others—as advantageous for Canadian companies in offering new goods and services export opportunities in new markets. Although tariff liberalization is the headline outcome that most of us tend to focus on because it's relatively easy to understand for the obvious reasons, a number of other issues are perhaps not as well understood, particularly when it comes to service exports.
One example is in the area of temporary entry, where Canadian companies have the ability to enter a market on a temporary basis to provide a service to a foreign consumer. However, even once trade negotiations are finished, similar to what has been said earlier, the work is just beginning for the government and Canadian businesses to take advantage of those FTAs. We think it requires three things for companies to be able to do that. The first is understanding the agreement and its provisions. The second is making connections with local buyers in that market, and the third is navigating the local government regulatory requirements, be they border or beyond the border.
Susanna will speak to the latter two, but I'll just touch briefly on the first one.
As I said, our negotiators do a fantastic job in negotiating them, but FTAs are by no means a cure-all for all our export problems. The barriers we face in large part might be due to regulatory measures in that country, which governments will rightly maintain for their own domestic reasons. At the Canadian chamber we feel it's vital that the government continues to work with our international counterparts on either mutual recognition or other regulatory co-operation initiatives that will make sure the benefits that companies should be receiving from these agreements, be they the liberalization of tariffs or the enhanced services market access provisions, are not nullified through other means.
A range of forums have been created in our agreements to address them, such as the regulatory co-operation forum in the EU-Canada FTA. In the case of the United States, the RCC sits as a separate organization, but nonetheless is an integral part of the overall architecture of the North American economic bloc. I think the only thing about the regulatory co-operation space is that it's a fairly bespoke service. What I mean by that is that the needs of companies in their particular sector are unique to that sector. What perhaps works in the agri-food space will not be necessarily replicated, obviously, if you're making a chair or a desk. Whenever governments are working to help our companies with those non-tariff barriers, we have to recognize that it is a fairly sector-by-sector approach.
Susanna will pick up some of this in her remarks, and with that I'll pass it over to her.