Mr. Chair and members of the committee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to appear before you again.
Let me start by reiterating what Mr. Innes said about the importance
of following agreements like the TPP and, of course, NAFTA.
This morning, I submitted a briefing note to the committee on the Pacific Alliance. I've been following the alliance, lecturing and researching it for about a decade now, ever since former prime minister Harper attended a meeting convened by the leaders of the alliance, minus Colombia, at the 2007 APEC summit, to discuss the idea of launching a new trade integration group in the Americas. I will let the note speak for itself. It serves as background. I'm not going to go through the details on the specifics of trade and the various sectors. You have the witnesses to do that.
I would also suggest that in 10 years the alliance has made remarkable progress on the trade integration agenda. It is considered by observers such as myself and groups like The Economist magazine and the Financial Times as the most exciting development in international trade. I suppose it says a lot about international trade if something like this is considered exciting, but that is indeed the case.
I would suggest that if the committee wants to get details on the technical aspects of how the alliance is progressing on the integration agenda, how they are working to combine beyond the border initiatives, one-stop shops throughout the alliance for businesses coming in, that information is available at the in-house think tank for the alliance. That think tank is at the trade integration division of the Inter-American Development Bank. They have been working with the alliance since its inception, and they would be able to brief you on the minute details of exactly what the integration agreement is, what progress is being made, and other technical details.
The head of the unit, Antoni Estevadeordal, is also a member of the policy council for the Trade & Investment Centre at the Canada West Foundation. He and his team are in Canada at least once a year, and they are quite familiar with issues in Canada. They would be uniquely positioned to brief the committee on issues on the technical side of what the alliance is doing. I've already given the names and contact details for the folks at the IDB to Christine, should you wish to call them.
Finally, of brief note, we're starting in Canada to sign agreements that are actually important for a larger swath of the business community than what I would call the usual suspects—groups that are already trading with countries like those in the Pacific Alliance, larger firms. We're starting to sign agreements that matter for small and medium-sized enterprises. As we run into difficulties with NAFTA, more and more of these firms that have habitually and by default always traded and never looked beyond the U.S. are beginning to think about looking beyond the U.S. Agreements like CETA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership are gaining interest.
We've done work in talking to small businesses in western Canada about how to prepare should NAFTA end—looking at tariffs in the U.S., talking to their U.S. suppliers and customers—but that work of helping businesses to think through the issues has these smaller businesses thinking about trade agreements, yet they are not on the radar screen of our traditional trade export and promotion groups.
A true, progressive trade agenda in Canada would be one that reaches all marginalized groups, groups that have been marginalized from trade and the benefits of signing trade agreements. That includes groups the government has identified, and we fully support their efforts to try to help these groups participate in trade. It also includes the small and medium-sized enterprises that haven't been participating in trade.
I would put on the table for the committee that a study in the future, where this committee could really do good work, would be taking the evidence and laying the foundation for this major shift in Canadian trade policy to focus on bringing in groups that have been for whatever reason marginalized from trade.
The foreign affairs committee did some of the work on laying the basis and the evidence for a shift in Canadian development policy to leverage the private sector. I think this committee could do the same thing.
We need evidence. We need the basis for this major policy shift at a time when we're finally starting to sign agreements again that we see matter, and we hear from small businesses that they haven't been thinking about trade agreements that matter for them.
Thank you.