Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank the witnesses for being here for our study of the Government of Canada's support for the international trade of small and medium-sized businesses.
It's kind of a coincidence, but last week I had a round table in Oshawa and I invited businesses. We had representatives from EDC and Global Affairs to get the message out, because we all know Oshawa got some really bad news recently and the people on the ground want to see what they can do to create jobs.
It was amazing that a lot of the businesses really had no idea. We have these trade agreements, but they don't know what to do. They expressed frustration, because some of them, especially the manufacturers, are being approached by Americans regularly to move their plants to the U.S.
I think, Mr. Naidu, you were talking about the competitiveness issue. That's what I heard at this round table. Especially with the new NAFTA, there was a failure to have the steel and aluminum tariffs removed. Just a couple of weeks ago, we heard about the Buy American exemption and how now Canada has lost it. Mexico has retained it. There's a big concern about access to U.S. contracts. The CME is calling for a reciprocity type of action, and we really haven't heard too much about what we can do about this.
I was going to ask Mr. Naidu and maybe Audrey Jobin what they think the government should do in particular about this Buy American exemption that we just lost, and how that is going to affect the ability of small and medium-sized businesses to export.