Welcome, panellists.
This is our last panel in our last province. We've embarked on this consultation process over the last few months.
We have with us the Canadian Labour Congress, Oxford Frozen Foods, Unifor, and the Wild Blueberry Producers Association of Nova Scotia. Welcome to all.
My name is Mark Eyking, and I'm the chair of the trade committee.
We have with us Tracey Ramsey and Dave Van Kesteren from southern Ontario, Gerry Ritz from Saskatchewan, Karen Ludwig from New Brunswick, Linda Lapointe from Quebec, and Sukh Dhaliwal from British Columbia. We had to leave a few of our members back in Ottawa.
We've been a very busy committee. We have to deal with a lot of issues. Canada is, of course, a trading country, so we had to deal with the European agreement. This is coming to some sort of an end, and we're dealing with that. We're dealing with issues with the United States. Examples are softwood lumber and agriculture.
However, TPP has been our main focus for the last few months. It's a big deal. It's a deal that's going to affect all Canadians one way or another. It involves 12 countries and 40% of the GDP and I think 800 million consumers.
We've been going pretty hard at this. We've been to every province and we've had video conferences with the territories. We have received almost 200 briefs, 300 witnesses, and over 20,000 emails. We've opened it up quite a bit to the public in accepting their emails. We've had an open mike at the end of each session, and we have had quite a bit of uptake on that.
We're finishing up our consultation process by the end of October. We'll be putting a report together and presenting it to the House of Commons at the end of the year or at the beginning of the following year.
Without further ado, we'll begin with the Canadian Labour Congress.
If the witnesses can keep it to five minutes or less, we'd appreciate it, because that way all the MPs can have a dialogue with you, and we won't fall behind in time.
Mr. Alex Furlong, you have the floor.