When we were in Chile, Canada and Japan were very close in that discussion. Like I said, we are the largest customer to the United States.... They are a very large economy.
I had a number of discussions with my Japanese counterpart. When we were in Chile, that meeting was about purpose, action, and ambition. The “purpose” was that people recommitted to free trade and rules-based trade in the Asia-Pacific region, namely Japan, but all the other countries. For “action”, we have agreed to task our officials to come back with options for when we meet at the next summit, which is at APEC in Vietnam. We also agreed that we should maintain a level of “ambition” and progressive elements. I was pleased to see other delegations taking words from the Canadian comments to include in their own comments in saying that “progressive” needs to be part of that.
I am in very close contact with Japan. I have proposed this to our Japanese counterpart. I said that we might as well work together on the track of increasing trade on a multilateral level in the Asia-Pacific region. I've already offered to our Japanese colleagues that I would very much be interested if they want to start the bilateral discussion again. As you know, we had one. It was put on hold at their request because they wanted to focus on TPP.
I have indicated to various ministers—because they came with three ministers and other ones—at every opportunity the wish of Canada to work co-operatively with them with respect to the Asia-Pacific, but also in a bilateral nature, because just as you've said, I think they would be interested. I'm waiting to hear from them. Perhaps when we come back from Vietnam, we'll have.... I think this is under consideration on their side, but this is something that we obviously would be interested in doing.