You raise an excellent question.
Trade agreements open the door; they don't guarantee that somebody will go through the door. The challenge for us, and one of the areas that I hope this committee will focus on, is that once we have the agreement in place, how do we ensure that Canadian business takes advantage of it? For example, do we have people with the skills and experience to be able to go internationally to market Canadian services?
We have been mesmerized with the U.S. market over the course of the last several decades. We still do, and we will do in the future, most of our trade with the U.S. We need to be able to look beyond that, to look at the opportunities in fast-growth markets, often on the other side of the world.
One thing that's distressing is that fewer than, I believe, 4% or 5% of Canadian students have any part of their education outside of Canada. As a consequence, they don't have the same sort of multicultural and multilingual experience that people in other parts of the world may have. We need to build and put into place an environment that makes it attractive and efficacious for people to be involved in terms of going international and succeeding.
We had the same concerns when we brought in the Canada-U.S. free trade agreement, that the Americans would eat us alive. We found that once those barriers came down, Canada's market share went up significantly. I think we'll find the same here.
If I were to give a pitch to the members of this committee, I would say there's one area where I think there's a real deficiency in terms of our trade strategy. We have a great competitive advantage in Canada. We have a pluralistic, multicultural, multilingual society, with every country's first-generation diaspora coming to Canada, speaking the language, working well with others, having family and friends back home, understanding those cultures, and by nature being entrepreneurial. They've left everything behind to come to Canada. Yet we don't have a strategy for seeing this as an economic resource to enable us to be far more successful in terms of cracking international markets.
One area where I think this committee could be helpful would be to help encourage government to include the global diaspora that we have in Canada as a key strategic advantage to us in going global.