Thank you very much, Madam Chair and members, for the invitation to speak here at committee today.
Although it's quite common for stakeholders to reference the critical or timely nature of a given study, I think this one really is. International trade is critical to Canada, and our relationships with both the U.S. and U.K. are critical as well.
I want to touch on three issues in my opening remarks this afternoon. The first point is that COVID-19’s impact on international trade has been substantial, and it certainly has brought into focus the need to strengthen supply chain resiliency. I think we all know and accept this. I think most commentary has missed the point that supply chain resiliency is not monolithic—each sector of the economy, and maybe each company, has different needs in regard to what that looks like for their supply chain circumstances.
Also quite importantly, we are a market-oriented economy. Governments generally don't own supply chains; instead, they incentivize private sector behaviour and create the conditions within which businesses operate. Our approach to supply chains needs to ensure that we have the interests of consumers and businesses in mind, in terms not only of their being able to supply inputs and products that we need both in the country and into the country, but also supporting exporters. It goes both ways.
It's also much more than just the production of physical goods. Services across different modes of supply play a critical role in supply chains, whether you're talking about the upstream parts, such as research and development, and engineering and design, or about after-sales servicing of equipment, or transportation and logistics.
This week the chamber released our position statement on supply chain resiliency, which I have shared with committee staff. Hopefully, members have had a chance to look at it in advance. In short, we think governments need to take a holistic approach in how domestic and international policy is used to support supply chain resiliency.
The document is quite long, so I'll just draw your attention to a few of the international tools we think need to be a critical part of the effort.
The first we're calling “security of supply agreements”. We've seen that export controls on medical equipment have proven to be a major problem during the early days of the pandemic. We're asking the government to take a positive approach with our most trusted allies and look at a way to circumscribe and tighten up how countries are allowed to use export restrictions.
We're not naive and certainly realize that there would only be a very small subset of countries that we'd be able to do this with. We commend the work that the government has done through the Ottawa Group and think that this might be a way to take that work, talking about transparency and time-limited and being proportionate, and take that to the next level in a tangible way.
Second, there also needs to be a much greater focus on the issue of industrial subsidies. This has been a long-standing problem since before the pandemic, but it's going to get worse as governments around the world throw huge sums of cash at their domestic industries. This is going to tilt the field against Canadian companies even more so than is already the case, and we certainly need to reign in the excesses of other countries by using multilateral or bilateral tools to do that.
The third aspect of supply chain resiliency is digital trade and e-commerce. As more activities head online, we need to make sure that our trade rules are relevant to the economy of 2020, whether that's cross-border data flows or trade facilitation measures that will support e-commerce.
The second point I want to talk about briefly is the United States. We very much welcome the entry into force of CUSMA and thank negotiators like Steve and his team who have done phenomenal work to get that deal over the finish line. However, our main message here is that it's too early to get out the proverbial mission accomplished banner, given that we have a number of other outstanding trade issues with the United States. The spectre of so-called national security tariffs on both metals and electrical coils looms large once again. We are steadfastly opposed to the United States using them and are working closely with our U.S. official counterparts and are calling on the government to be active on that issue. Additionally, we are without a softwood lumber agreement at the moment. We hope that the resolution of CUSMA will create bandwidth to be able to pick up this issue again and bring it to a resolution.
The last piece I want to touch on in my opening remarks is our relationship with the United Kingdom. In the absence of further developments, Canadian companies are generally now operating on the assumption that the U.K. will leave its current transition status with the EU as of the end of 2020, and that it will enact its so-called global tariff regime in January 2021, which was announced earlier this year.
This means fundamentally that the clock is ticking. Given that discussions have been happening for some time between the U.K. and Canada, our view is that we need to conclude the efforts to transpose the CETA into a bilateral agreement at the earliest possible opportunity and begin the necessary implementation processes, especially here in Canada.
Being fully self-aware, I know this view puts the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in a slightly different spot from some others, but our position is informed by several factors.
One, companies have already faced more than enough supply chain disruptions in the last number of months. Let's give companies the certainty they need and ensure that they won't face tariffs on their exports to the U.K., potentially as of January next year.
The second piece is that, based on the media reporting we're seeing on what the European Commission has said about the status of the U.K.-EU discussions, they might not be finalized until October. That certainly cuts very close to the end of the year, and given our own parliamentary timings, if we decide to wait until we have complete certainty about the outcome of the U.K.-EU discussions, that doesn't leave much time for businesses to plan, especially in the COVID-19 context.
The third factor is that landing a bilateral agreement with the U.K. based on the CETA positions us quite well to take the trade relationship to the next level. Out of the 28 countries in the EU, the U.K. is the one where we can probably have the most advanced trade relationship possible. This includes, for example, deepening services, regulatory work and digital trade rules. It also sends an important signal for Canada to maintain that we are the only G7 country to have comprehensive FTAs with all other G7 countries.
The Canadian Chamber of Commerce represents Canada at a number of global business forums, and that's a point we're always very proud to make when we are speaking to our global counterparts when representing Canada abroad.
I'll stop there, but I'm certainly happy to take any questions from committee members in the Q and A rounds.