I thank the member for Elmwood—Transcona for that question.
I would actually counter that, for Canada, on paper we do have a long list of agreements, but our ability to actually have agreements that work with business, that reduce the cost for businesses and the ability of businesses to get there, is not as good as those of our competitors. I would point to the work we did at Canada West—it's in the briefing material you have—on the problems we have with our export support services for business.
The issue there, like trade agreements, is that we have so many, but they're separate and they're disparate. It's confusing for businesses, especially businesses that are trading in the U.S. and haven't traditionally used trade services, to figure out from this long list of services who does what—EDC, BDC, TCS. We have some real fundamental problems in terms of rationalization and organization here in Canada. The paper I just referenced looks at the American experience in bringing rationality and coherence to their disparate trade services to enhance the ability of American firms abroad.
We lack a strategy, especially for Asia and for booming markets in Asia. We do not have a white paper on trade strategy. We do not have a white paper for Asia, for China. One of my colleagues on the panel was mentioning Australia. One of the reasons why Australia has had better performance is that they've managed to have government policy and have clear objectives set through white papers. There are problems with that, but I think this is a real problem, and on the overall strategy level, it has been a major issue. I do not think that Canada is performing as well as it can.
Our absence from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership is another indication of a problem. Our problem in getting into the trans-Pacific partnership, later the CPTPP, was an indication of another problem that did real damage to Canadian trade aspirations in Asia.