Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair.
I would certainly agree with everything Doug has said so far and associate myself with his response.
I believe the question was whether there are examples of similar measures being imposed by some of our trading partners around the world and what the consequences of those might be. I have to say I am not aware of any legislative prohibition on our trading partners' ability to discuss an issue.
Were such a prohibition in place, I feel that depending on the level of commercial interest that Canada had in the matter that was covered by such a prohibition, we would use the exploratory stage of our trade negotiations to indicate that we see this as an important issue that needs to be discussed in the context of the negotiation.
Free trade agreements are really about changing the legislative and regulatory regime that our trading partners have in place in order to create commercial opportunities for Canadian exporters, so I suspect that were our interests sufficiently significant for us to want to discuss that issue in the negotiations, we would make that clear at the exploratory stage and base our decision on whether to move forward in the negotiations on our partners' indication of their capacity to have discussions in that area.
On the specific question of whether there are examples I could point to, I have to say offhand that I can't think of any similar prohibitions that are in place.