Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Good morning. I'm delighted to be here in front of the members.
I'm Finn Poschmann, president of the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, a charitable think tank with the wonderfully simple mandate of promoting the economic well-being of the Atlantic region. We've been around since 1954, and my favourite underwear is Stanfield's.
Trade, international trade, and investor protection deals are not always big deals, not always big political footballs. We have a trade deal with Chile, for example, signed 20 years ago, and nobody has ever noticed it much. Meanwhile, our world is criss-crossed by a web of bilateral investment treaties, about 3,000 of them. Canada is signatory to dozens of them, not all enforced. They're not always big political or economic issues. They facilitate doing business and moving people, goods, and services across borders.
We have two very big current deals awaiting ratification, and they are big political footballs; they're important to Canada. Canada should be cheering these deals enthusiastically. I'm referring to the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the EU and the trans-Pacific partnership, the topic of our discussion today.
Many of us have mentioned CETA in passing, and I'll do the same. CETA is important to us because it improves market access for our goods and services in Europe, and it also improves prices and product choices here. It'll bring more competition into public procurement, and, even better in my view, it will put a little bit of a dent in the supply management system, and I think that's good.
Most of CETA can be provisionally applied, but it's not legally binding until it's been ratified by individual EU member states. That process has been horrendously complicated by Britain's decision to leave the EU, and the deal is under attack in many countries from the left and the right. Opponents in the EU are concerned about Canada weakening their environmental and labour standards, so I think we need a charm offensive on behalf of Canadian trade in Europe.
It's hard to say whether prospects are worse for TPP. As we've heard, TPP would boost markets nicely for our sea products and other agricultural goods and it would provide a bit of a boost to our ports and transport sectors.
Canada came late to the TPP negotiations. We were under some encouragement from Australia and New Zealand, which saw that the deal would be easier to sell in the U.S. if Canada was in. Those countries also wanted dairy market access in Canada, and they will get a little bit of it. Over the course of 20 years, the deal will slightly increase our supply of milk for industrial processing, with only a small impact on the retail market. That's a good start, too.
The barriers to TPP ratification are not here in Canada. For the moment, they're in the United States. President Barack Obama's administration had enthusiastically backed TPP, and they negotiated it. President Obama secured trade promotion authority, or fast track, in Congress with bipartisan support, with the full expectation that the deal would eventually pass. When Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she said the TPP was the gold standard of trade deals; not everything Donald Trump says is wrong.
While her comment about the gold standard was probably hyperbolic, no trade deal is perfect. They always represent a muddied middle ground of negotiations between economic and political parties. It's a good deal nonetheless, because it opens markets under broader and better terms for Canadians already selling into many of the Asian markets.
The TPP, as I've hinted, certainly is not perfect. With respect to intellectual property, I agree that there are patent extensions as well as copyright term extensions that I don't think do anybody much good. Mostly with respect to patents, it's not a very big shift for Canada, but I can't say that we needed it either.