Thank you very much, Mr. Arya. That is an excellent question. It points to something about the new NAFTA that is not fully appreciated by Canadians.
Something we have discussed often with the negotiators is that in many ways the negotiation around the new NAFTA was almost a two-level negotiation. There was the very high-profile set of issues, often about Canada's pushing back against unprecedented protectionist demands from the United States. That was what was most visible to Canadians, what Canadians were quite rightly most concerned about. Then there was a negotiation on what we sometimes have referred to as the set of bread and butter trade issues. These are the kinds of issues trade negotiations are more routinely concerned about, and they're where some of the greatest gains of NAFTA were won. Let me talk about a few of them.
One is that this agreement has very successfully removed a lot of the red tape associated with cross-border trade. In the consultations we did before and during the negotiation, one of the things we learned, and that we heard most urgently from Canadian businesses engaged in trade in the NAFTA region, was that their greatest issue was all the red tape involved in trade. We heard from a surprising number of businesses that simply didn't bother to claim their NAFTA preferences because the red tape was so overwhelming. Think about that. The weight of the red tape was greater than the value of the tariff-free access that NAFTA offered.
One of the real pluses of this agreement is that, working together with the United States and Mexico, we have done a very good job of cutting back a lot of the red tape by using some of the technologies that the 21st century allows to make it easier for people to trade. That is one of the things we did with NAFTA. It doesn't make a great headline, but it will make life easier for a lot of Canadian businesses and will make them much more competitive.
In terms of the 21st-century economy more broadly, that was another part of this that was beneath the sea level, if you think of an iceberg. There was the tip of the iceberg, the very visible struggles, and then there was all the rest of the iceberg. That was another part of all the rest of the iceberg of the negotiation: a stated effort where we had real agreement between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico to modernize this agreement, to make it relevant to the shape of the 21st-century economy, relevant for the service sector and for sectors of the economy that are based much more on intellectual property than on physical goods. I think we achieved a great deal there.
I would like to make one final point. When it comes to certainty in the future—and to me, this is a very important element of the new NAFTA, something that I hope we in Canada will be able to replicate—after an arduous process of negotiation, we have achieved an agreement that has strong cross-party support in both the U.S. and Mexico.
Mr. Hoback referred to the fact that the U.S. managed to ratify this agreement in the heat of the impeachment struggle in the U.S. We have, in the new NAFTA, an agreement that both Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump support. I struggle to think of anything else those two important American leaders both support. It's important for Canada that they both support it, because that gives us a real guarantee for the future.
Madam Chair is asking me to wrap up, but let me just conclude by also referring to our guest from Mexico, Mr. Seade. He represents a government that was not in office when the bulk of this agreement was negotiated. I would like to thank and acknowledge the work of Ambassador Seade, and also of President López Obrador. They did a difficult thing, which was to take an agreement that was negotiated by their predecessors and political opponents, take ownership of it and get it across the finish line. That's a real show of national unity in Mexico.
I think it would be great if we could accomplish the same thing here in Canada.
Thank you.