Good morning everyone and welcome to the House of Commons Standing Committee on International Trade. It's going to be like in the House of Commons. There's going to be translation, French and English. We have the translators, if you need translation.
My name is Mark Eyking. I am the chair of the committee. I'm from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Not all of our committee members are with us, but a good majority are here today. We have Tracey Ramsey and Dave Van Kesteren from southern Ontario, Gerry Ritz from Saskatchewan, Sukh Dhaliwal from British Columbia, Linda Lapointe from Quebec, and Karen Ludwig from New Brunswick. It's great to be here.
Our committee is very busy, as you know. Trade is important to Canada. Of course, the United States is our biggest trading partner. Our committee has been busy with the softwood lumber and many of the agriculture issues that we are faced with, but our biggest task that we took on this year was the TPP.
Right now, we are in the midst of an agreement with the Trans-Pacific Partnership. We're tidying up the European agreement which is a moving target over there, but it looks like it's coming together. TPP is very important for Canada. There are 12 countries with 40% of the GDP in the world. There are 800 million consumers, so it's an area that we have to look at very strongly.
There are, however, differing opinions on this agreement, and what our committee is doing is travelling the country and listening to Canadians, listening to stakeholders, those who have an interest. At the end of the day, this agreement will affect all Canadians, whether they're consumers or they're supplying a product.
We visited six provinces already and had a video conference with the territories. We're finishing our last leg of travel this week. We're saving the best for last. I'm an Atlantic Canadian. We're going to visit the four Atlantic provinces this week. We're going to P.E.I. tomorrow and then Newfoundland, and then finishing up in Halifax.
In addition to our travel, we probably have 125 briefs. So far, we've had almost 265 witnesses. The other thing we're doing differently with our committee is that we've opened it up to the public. We are accepting emails from the public. Right now, we've received over 2,000 emails. We're going to accept them until the end of October.
We are also doing something different that no other committee has done when travelling. We have an open mike segment for an hour at the end of each of our our meetings, so we can hear from the public.
We are going to be finishing up our consultation process, receiving information until the end of October. After that, we are going back to Ottawa, and our committee will draft a report. That will take probably at least five or six weeks. We're hoping that by the end of December, or at the very least the first of January, we can present our report to Parliament.
Without further ado, we are here in wonderful New Brunswick. We have quite a list of presenters today. We have segments of one hour. This morning, we have three witnesses. We have the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, Cooke Aquaculture, and the New Brunswick Federation of Labour.
For the presenters, we try to keep it within five minutes, if possible. After that, we open up for dialogue with the members.
We're going to start with the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters. Mr. Joel Richardson, welcome.