Good afternoon.
First, on behalf of Jayson Myers, who was scheduled to be here today to talk to you about our views on North American trade, I would like to express his regrets. He was unable to change his schedule and accommodate the change.
I am very pleased to be here representing the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. Thank you to the members of this committee for inviting us back to discuss this very important topic.
Many of us here today have spoken to this committee before on this issue, and we would commend the work of this committee in staying engaged and current on all the developments as they unfold and as they affect Canada's most vital trade relationships.
Before I move on to discussing the priorities for the chamber, I would like to take a moment to congratulate the government for the outstanding effort in deploying the Canada-U.S. advocacy campaign across the United States. It's something that has been mentioned to us by members on both sides of the border, as well as our partners at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They really do see it as a very valuable exercise where they have seen real impacts, so thanks to the government for that, including some of the members of this committee who have travelled across the United States.
Likewise, since the negotiations began for NAFTA's modernization, our team of negotiators has been put under enormous pressure in having to work against really hard deadlines under a lot of strain, and they have done so in an incredibly poised and professional way. We would like to say that we have been very well served by the professional team at Global Affairs.
On the current state of play, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce has spoken before about NAFTA being the most important trade agreement for the Canadian economy. It supports a complex web of bilateral and trilateral relationships in North America that results in a commercial exchange of over a trillion dollars per year. That is really the envy of the world. We have heard this in other jurisdictions where we travel—sometimes to China and Japan—and they really do envy what we have here. Again, our priority is to protect it.
I should say that today, as Andrea already explained, North American and Canadian businesses are very concerned by the alarming signals that we are receiving from the negotiations—basically, the mood and where they are headed. The political climate in the U.S., and in Mexico as well, and these extremely ambitious timelines are not very encouraging, and they're not very easy to manage, either for the government or the negotiators, but also for us as stakeholders. It's hard to keep up. It's hard to keep businesses engaged and to know how to react with sufficient time.
A lot of it still hangs on the text proposals by the USTR, which are yet to materialize. Until we see this text, it's hard for us to assess where we're headed. Hopefully, we will see the text by the fourth round, although we were expecting to see it sometime in the third round. These are complicated times, and we appreciate that.
In terms of our priorities, our first and top priority continues to be “do no harm”. At the beginning of the summer, some perhaps criticized this principle as lacking in ambition, but we and our partners in the U.S. and Mexico simply cannot state this enough. “Do no harm” means that a new NAFTA must in no way roll back any of the current benefits of the NAFTA. This continues to be at the top of our wish list.
Second, a new NAFTA must pay attention to preserving the competitiveness of our integrated value chains. As Andrea already mentioned, this is key. We can do this through maintaining the very delicate balance that exists in rules of origin, for example, but also by introducing modern provisions that will boost our region's competitiveness, not for today or next year, but for the next 20, 30, or 50 years. That includes issues such as infrastructure, border efficiency, movement of professionals, or regulatory harmonization, for example.
Third, I would fully agree with the remark made earlier by the Business Council that North American trade must not return to an environment that lacks appropriate dispute settlement mechanisms. Any outcome in a new NAFTA that falls short of the current levels of discipline we have, either through NAFTA or the WTO, would be a step backwards. This, in our view, would be unacceptable. There is room for improvement, and we would support some improvements to the dispute resolution mechanisms in NAFTA, but elimination would be unacceptable to us.
The fourth priority—