Just pursuing the earlier question, it seems to me that Canada stands out as being a country that does significantly less industrial planning domestically than a lot of our competitors do. We talk a lot about international trade, and I would say sometimes we even have a dogmatic emphasis on free trade agreements, yet we hear that Canadian business is often unready to exploit the touted advantages of the agreements we sign. To what extent is that a product of not really having an industrial strategy as a country?
We also take a kind of laissez-faire approach to our domestic economy as an article of faith, but it seems to me not to work very well when we talk about what we want to accomplish on the international stage, how we want to support companies to succeed on the international stage, and how we want to translate that into value-added jobs in Canada. We've also seen, over the last 25 to 30 years, a loss of a lot of value-added production. We're out signing international trade agreements. There's been GDP growth, to be sure, and a lot of Canadian businesses have thrived, but we've lost a lot of value-added work. We don't have industrial strategies domestically. We're signing agreements that open up our markets as much as they provide us market access, yet we don't seem ready to seize those opportunities.
Does anybody care to speak to the relationship between industrial planning at home and having a cohesive international trade agenda?