Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here. I really appreciate your being here on short notice. This is such an important agreement.
Mr. Sobot, when you said we should pass this quickly, I think everybody around the table wants to make sure this does pass, but we want to make sure we do our due diligence. With any of these agreements, some families, some businesses and some sectors are negatively affected. You even mentioned the challenges with the buy American situation. Mr. Benson mentioned some lost opportunities. We've heard from other sectors, whether softwood lumber, buy American.... By signing on to this, we are losing some leverage we could have had, and that's a concern.
You mentioned that Mexico may have an exemption to buy American in article 32.11. That concerns me, particularly when it seems that in the past we were able to negotiate an exemption.
I was wondering how that can be. What have you seen or heard from other industry colleagues regarding why we weren't able to get those exemptions? Was it a priority for the negotiators? What exactly happened? Did you hear anything?