Absolutely. I guess there are two issues there. One is the trade promotion issue. In my department, Global Affairs Canada, we do have a team in place to promote not just the Canada-EU agreement, the Canada-U.K. agreement, the CPTPP...and elsewhere around the world in order to enhance the opportunities for Canadian companies to export. As I said earlier, it's especially for the small businesses that may not have all the information at hand, may not have the expertise and may not know the best way or route to export.
What we see is that a lot of our companies export to the U.S. It's not a surprise that around 80% of our exports go to the United States. It's the easiest market, right? But if we're going to diversify our trade and increase our exports, we'll have to reach beyond the United States market. That's why the government is negotiating the free trade agreements. We have CETA, Canada-U.K., CPTPP and others that we're working on. Once those negotiations are completed, we need to make sure that businesses, exporters and producers all know about them. We need to do a better job of promoting. As I said, we have a team from Global Affairs in place to do that.
Then we need to help them too, and that's our trade commissioner service. As I said, they work regionally across Canada but then in-market to help “pathfind” for companies, help identify opportunities and help make business connections.
So I thank you for the question and recognize that we need to do more to work with companies to make sure that the opportunities are available to them.