International Trade Committee on Nov. 16th, 2020

[The Chair (Hon. Judy A. Sgro (Humber River—Black Creek, Lib.)), Liberal, Judy Sgro]

I call to order this meeting of the Standing Committee on International Trade. Welcome to meeting number five.

Today's meeting is taking place in the hybrid format, pursuant to the House order of September 23, 2020. The proceedings are available via the House of Commons website.

To ensure an orderly meeting, I would like to outline a few rules as follows.

Members and witnesses may speak in the official language of their choice. Interpretation services are available for this meeting. You have the choice at the bottom of your screen of either floor, English or French.

For members participating in person, proceed as you usually would when the whole committee is meeting in person in a committee room. Keep in mind the directives from the Board of Internal Economy regarding masking and health protocols.

Before speaking, please wait until I recognize you by name. If you are on a video conference, please click on the microphone icon to unmute yourself. For those in the room, your microphone will be controlled as normal by the proceedings and verification officer. When you are not speaking, your microphone should be on mute.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), the committee will now proceed with the study of trade between Canada and the United Kingdom on a potential transitional trade agreement.

We welcome as our witnesses today, for the full two hours, from the Business Council of Canada, Trevor Kennedy, director of policy; and from the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Mark Agnew, senior director, international policy. From the Canadian Labour Congress, we have Hassan Yussuff, president; and Chris Roberts, director of social and economic policy. From the Trade Justice Network, we have Larry Brown, who is president of the National Union of Public and General Employees.

Mr. Kennedy, the floor is yours, for 10 minutes, please.

[Trevor Kennedy, Director, Policy, Business Council of Canada]

Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members, for the invitation to take part in your meeting on trade between Canada and the United Kingdom, a potential transitional trade agreement.

The Business Council of Canada is composed of 150 chief executives and enterprises of Canada's leading enterprises. Our members, directly and indirectly, support more than six million jobs across the country and hundreds of thousands of small businesses. For our members, trade is very important.

Canada is a trading nation with 65% of our GDP tied to trade and millions of well-paying jobs across the country connected to the flow of goods and services around the world. We cannot take this for granted. In recent years some of our most important trade relationships have been undermined by rising protectionism and uncertainty. At the same time the multilateral rules-based global trading system, the foundation for post-war prosperity, which has led to increased living standards for Canadians, is at risk.

Given this backdrop, not to mention the economic hardship caused by COVID-19, Canada needs stable and secure bilateral trade agreements, particularly with key partners in the Indo-Pacific and Europe, to both safeguard and diversify our trade. The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, CETA, has been particularly important in achieving both objectives. At a time when growth in global trade is slowing, our exports to the European Union have grown at a fast rate, 7.7% in 2019, and bilateral trade flows have stabilized.

There is still much work to do to ensure that small and medium-sized enterprises can take full advantage of this agreement and to address some industry-specific concerns, but in the big picture, CETA is working for Canadian exporters.

The U.K., as a part of the EU, has been a critical component of this fast-growing trade relationship under CETA. As of 2019 it accounted for 40% of Canada's merchandise exports and 36% of services exports to the European Union.

Merchandise exports to the U.K. have grown by nearly 12% since provisional application. Canadian exporters have momentum in the U.K., and it is important that this continues.

The last few years have clearly demonstrated how important the U.K. market is for Canadian business. Early in the Brexit process many expected that Canadian firms would move operations from the U.K., largely based on the assumption that it was being primarily used as the launchpad for business into the European Union.

While we've seen some staff move from or to continental operations and have seen the establishment of new satellite offices elsewhere in the EU, for the most part Canadian firms have remain committed to the U.K. This is because it is valued as a market for goods and services providers and London continues to be an important financial capital.

Among Business Council members, at least one third have a meaningful presence in the market, and for some, the U.K. is their only market in Europe.

For these reasons it is critical that we maintain our access beyond the end of the Brexit transition period. The transitional trade deal approach taken by negotiators is wise, given the circumstances. We do not know what the future U.K.-EU trade relationship will look like and a transitional approach gives us the opportunity to take that future relationship into account when we negotiate a trade deal. We also have faced a rapidly changing environment and we have been pressed for time.

As with Canada's existing free trade agreements, we want to ensure we reach a conclusive deal in the future with the appropriate consultation and assessment of market opportunities for Canadian firms. The transitional approach will allow us to do this while we maintain our position in the market.

Japan and South Korea have already finalized agreements to roll over most of their existing EU trade deals. At the same time, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. are negotiating deals not based on existing frameworks with the European Union. Some of these talks appear to be advanced and if they are in place without a transitional deal for Canada, they could result in Canadian firms losing their market share and first mover advantage that we secured under CETA.

A transitional deal would preserve this important relationship, and we encourage both sides to move quickly to limit disruption at the end of the year. Canada's transitional deal should be designed to be temporary by including reasonable review clauses or expiry dates. We support this approach as an incentive to drive continued bilateral talks toward a long-term agreement.

Business leaders support the inclusion and swift ratification of a transitional deal to keep Canada-U.K. trade tariff-free, to make the economy more vibrant and competitive, and to drive investment support for the creation of high-value jobs.

Looking forward on the Canada -U.K. trade relationship, we believe there is an opportunity to rethink and enhance bilateral trade and investment ties with a comprehensive and ambitious free trade agreement.

We hope both parties can start working on this with stakeholders as soon as possible.

Thank you for this opportunity to address the committee, and I look forward to answering any questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mr. Kennedy.

We go to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce and Mark Agnew.

The floor is yours for 10 minutes.

[Mark Agnew, Senior Director, International Policy, Canadian Chamber of Commerce]

Thank you, Madam Chair and honourable members, for the invitation to speak as part of the committee's U.K. study. It's a pleasure to be back here and to see you all again virtually.

As the committee's members will appreciate, the U.K. is a significant trading partner for Canada. It's our third-largest goods export market and second-largest destination for foreign direct investment abroad. As Trevor alluded to a moment ago, it's quite important, particularly in the EU-28 context, with 40% of our merchandise exports and 36% of our service exports from the EU-28 going to the U.K.

Despite the impressive overall rankings, it still is an overall small proportion of our global trade share, behind the United States. The relationship, we feel, has the potential to grow, and certainly Britain is an ideal market for Canadian companies seeking to diversify, given our shared language and ways of doing business.

With the EU separation question firmly decided in the U.K., we need to look ahead to dealing with the world as it is. The reality means that, once the U.K.'s transition period with the EU ends on December 31, the U.K. will no longer be treated as if it were a party to CETA by the Government of Canada. Given how important the U.K. is as part of the EU-28's export basket, the short answer is that Brexit matters for Canadian businesses.

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce has not completed our own in-house modelling, but some external work serves as a rough guide for what the potentials are. Canadian economist Dan Ciuriak conducted an analysis in 2018 as part of the British government's CETA impact assessment. The study found that by 2030 the value of the U.K.'s participation in CETA would be worth about £1.1 billion, or approximately $1.9 billion Canadian in terms of Canadian exports to the U.K.

Although this is definitely not a precise measurement, given that we don't know the final architecture of the U.K.'s trade arrangements with the EU and Canada and that we don't know what the U.K.'s final picture will be in 2030, given that the study was done with a 10-year time horizon, and that we also have divergences in the U.K. and EU's MFN tariff rates, it nonetheless provides at least a decent rough signpost on the potential for what a U.K.-Canada trade deal means to the Canadian economy.

I'd like to just be a bit more specific now on some of the immediate implications of not having a transition agreement in place by December 31.

The first is tariffs. Canadian businesses will lose preferential access to the U.K. market, making our products less competitive. Some examples of where we would face tariffs under the U.K.'s global tariff regime include lobster products, with tariffs of up to 10%; plastics under HS 3908, with tariffs of up to 6%; vehicles under HS 8703, with tariffs of up to 10%; and beef products under HS 0201 with an ad valorem tariff of up to 12%, plus specific tariff units per kilogram.

I should add here a note that Canadian beef products have a TRQ under CETA and certainly any TRQs that are transposed into a U.K.-Canada context need to be commercially viable for Canadian companies to take advantage of them.

The second, which we will not have without a transition agreement in place, are the discussions around regulatory co-operation. CETA provides a framework for critical regulatory dialogue to occur on agriculture non-tariff barriers and through the conformity assessment protocol. Regulatory co-operation is not glamorous; it's the nuts and bolts of trade and absolutely critical. Our trade agreements have an important role in shining a spotlight on the work that regulators do to make sure that issues are advancing in a timely manner for businesses. Certainly agriculture non-tariff barriers have been quite problematic in the EU context, and we hope that the U.K. will eventually take a different approach.

The last is service exports. CETA's temporary entry chapter provides provisions on intra-company transferees, and this means that Canadian companies can bring in specialized talent to work in Canadian operations. CETA's contractual service suppliers' provisions mean that specialized skills can be brought in to fill supply chain gaps for Canadian businesses. CETA provisions on these entry categories reduce business burdens and, without them in a U.K. context, companies will need to use other routes that are more cumbersome.

Simply put, if CETA matters, then transitioning it into a bilateral agreement also matters. We have been working closely with our U.K. counterparts at the Confederation of British Industry to advance this and will continue to do so until the deal is done.

Certainly we hope this committee will be able to facilitate an expeditious passage of the implementing legislation once the agreement is finalized.

As members of the committee will appreciate, everything you do in trade builds on what came before it. CETA was the gold standard when it was negotiated, but the Canada-U.K. transitioning agreement should be seen as a starting point for going further.

I'd like to quickly highlight five areas where we think we can do this.

Number one is digital trade. Since CETA's negotiation, global trade discussions on digital trade rules have taken on a much bigger focus. This includes the WTO as well as our digital trade chapters in CPTPP and CUSMA. Discussions with the U.K. on digital trade should support better data flows by Canadian companies.

Number two is regulatory co-operation. The future gains on merchandise trade will ultimately be determined by reducing non-tariff barriers given how low tariff rates are for most products. This is particularly important for Canadian agriculture exporters, as I alluded to a moment ago, where it's been a tough slog in the EU. There's also forward-looking work that we can do in areas like health sciences procurement as well as cybersecurity.

Number three is critical minerals. The global supply of rare earth minerals that enable the production of many high-tech products remains dangerously concentrated. Future discussions between the U.K. and Canada should facilitate greater private sector production and movement of these rare earth extractive products.

Number four is trade facilitation. The pandemic has emphasized the value of the efficient movement of goods globally. Canada and the U.K. should explore ways to introduce additional measures that would modernize customs processing in CETA, and build on the free trade agreement from the WTO.

Number five is labour mobility. Enhancing the ability of companies to attract talent and access service contracts abroad is critical to diversifying what you're exporting, not just to where. Activities like after-sales servicing can actually be more lucrative for companies than the original export itself, so we should try to be ambitious in how we approach this business activity.

Without a bilateral agreement in place, certainly these five areas, and work on other areas like sustainability, will be difficult to go further on.

Thank you for your consideration, and we look forward to the discussion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much, Mr. Agnew.

We're moving on to the Canadian Labour Congress.

Mr. Yussuff, please go ahead for 10 minutes.

[Hassan Yussuff, President, Canadian Labour Congress]

Good morning, Madam Chair and committee members. Thank you for having us. My colleague Chris Roberts will join me if there are any questions.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today. It's a pleasure for us to be here.

The Canadian Labour Congress is Canada's largest central labour body. The CLC brings together some 50 national and international unions across Canada. As well, it gathers together 12 provincial and territorial federations of labour and 100 labour councils across the country. The CLC speaks on issues of national importance for three million unionized men and women. These individuals work in the public and private sectors, and in both trade-exposed and trade-sheltered industries.

The CLC perspective on international trade is that Canada has always been a trading nation. It is a small, open economy relying on exports. The CLC has always advocated for fair trade as opposed to free trade. In our view, international trade and investment rules should foster inclusive, equitable and sustainable economic growth. Trade rules should boost employment and real incomes, not destroy jobs and raise the cost of living. They should, of course, lift incomes and improve working conditions, not drive them down.

They should reduce inequality, not worsen it. They should encourage and reinforce the capacity of governments to pursue full employment and regulate in the public interest, not erode or curtail these powers. They should be designed transparently and with public involvement and debate, and not behind closed doors with multinational investors calling the shots.

In other words, international trade agreements should first and foremost serve the interests of working people and ordinary residents of Canada. Trade agreements should be an opportunity to strengthen labour and environment protections, toughen safeguards for women and migrant workers, and lift food safety and public health standards.

For far too long, trade agreements have been negotiated hidden from civil society and responding mainly to corporations and investors. The terms of the trade agreements have been about shackling the ability of governments to regulate, invest and spend in the public interest.

I will speak to a trade agreement with the United Kingdom. The Government of Canada has signalled its commitment to negotiate progressive trade agreements with trading partners. In our view, the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the European Union, CETA, should not be the standard for negotiating a bilateral trade agreement with the United Kingdom.

In several important respects CETA has been surpassed by the provisions of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, CUSMA. On the investor-state dispute settlement, ISDS, the CUSMA eliminated this dispute settlement mechanism in chapter 11 of NAFTA. In our view, ISDS provisions must be omitted from Canada's future trade agreements. There is no reason that our principle trading partners, particularly rich, industrialized countries with well-developed domestic court systems, need these mechanisms. These arrangements are nothing more than a means for large corporations and investors to curtail and dissuade government regulation for private gain.

Under NAFTA, Canada was sued some 40 times and forced to pay over $300 million in penalties and fees. The majority of these trade disputes involved Canada's environmental laws. This is simply unacceptable.

In our view, there is no need for a CETA-style investment court system allowing foreign transnationals to sue governments outside of the U.K. or Canadian court systems.

On labour rights, from the CLC's perspective, any new agreement with the United Kingdom must include robust and fully enforceable provisions for labour rights. CETA's provisions are not fully enforceable. Instead, they are subject to a non-binding compliance mechanism relying on co-operation and dialogue through a process of consultations and advice from an expert panel.

CUSMA brings labour provisions into the main agreement as a stand-alone labour chapter. As a result, labour rights in CUSMA are fully subjected to the state-to-state dispute settlement process in the agreement. It also commits each country to implement policies that protect workers against sexual harassment and wage and employment discrimination on the basis of sex. This includes discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity and caregiving responsibilities. CUSMA includes new provisions committing signatories to take steps to prohibit the importation of goods produced by forced labour, address violence against workers exercising their labour rights, and ensure that migrant workers are protected under the labour laws.

CUSMA also includes a new facility-specific rapid-response mechanism. This mechanism provides for enhanced provisions to ensure effective implementation of labour obligations at covered facilities.

In our view, these labour provisions in CUSMA should be a starting point for Canada's future trade agreements. Future trade agreements should also require signatories to uphold fundamental labour rights in the International Labour Organization's core conventions. These commitments should be fully enforceable.

On pharmaceutical drugs, Canada's spending on pharmaceutical and patent drug prices is among the highest in the world. Canadians already pay far more for prescription drugs and face higher drug prices than their counterparts in most OECD countries. Both agreements, CETA and CUSMA, will contribute further to driving up drug costs by delaying the entry of generic medicines. Any future trade agreements with the United Kingdom cannot aggravate the problem. Pharmaceutical companies must not receive protection at the expense of Canadians.

On climate change, CETA's chapters on “Trade and Sustainable Development” and “Trade and Environment” contain positive commitments on the environment. However, the commitments are not binding, and there are no effective enforcement mechanisms for CETA environmental commitments. For its part, CUSMA is silent on environmental change. Future trade and investment commitments must contain binding commitments to combat climate change. They must avoid ISDS clauses that will directly undermine the ability of governments to live up to their climate change commitments.

On public services, in 2016, European opposition to perceived threats to public services in CETA nearly upended the signing of the agreement. In order to get the deal done, the parties had to craft a joint interpretive instrument containing assurances about the autonomy of governments to provide, regulate, create and expand public services. However, the text of CETA itself does not fully and effectively exclude public services. To correct this, any new trade and investment agreement should include a clear and fully effective exclusion for public service. Such a provision should ensure that all levels of government can create new public services, expand existing ones and reverse privatization, without risking sanctions or compensation claims under trade and investment agreements.

On regulatory co-operation, CETA's “Regulatory Cooperation” chapter and its Regulatory Cooperation Forum aim at limiting regulatory differences between Canada and the EU. These initiatives will target regulations pertaining to food safety and biotechnology, chemicals and consumer and environmental protections.

These regulations are often characterized as impending market access and hindering trade; however, these regulations are often the result of popular and consumer demands for food safety and health and environmental protections.

CETA's regulatory reform discussions also occur in forums that lack transparency and democratic accountability and tend to be dominated by industry and commercial interests. This sort of approach to regulatory co-operation will not inspire public confidence. Canada can and should ensure far greater transparency and democratic accountability in the regulatory chapters of future trade agreements.

In conclusion, our trade relationship with United Kingdom is vitally important. In order to achieve a truly progressive trade agreement governing Canada-U.K. trade, we must have rules that benefit the many, rather than the few. Trade rules must instill confidence in governments' ability to regulate on behalf of working people, and the interests and voices of working people must be included in the development of any agreement.

Recent experience in North America and western Europe has made one lesson perfectly clear. Trade and investment agreements that bring benefits to a small elite, and job losses and declining prospects for working people, will stoke popular resentment and opposition.

Thank you so much. I look forward to any questions the committee members may have.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you, Mr. Yussuff.

We will go on to Mr. Brown, president of the National Union of Public and General Employees.

[Larry Brown, President, National Union of Public and General Employees, Trade Justice Network]

Thank you very much, and thank you for this opportunity to speak to you this morning.

Let me start with what I think is a very important point that hasn't been covered yet, which is that when we get into looking at any potential new trade deals labelling is really important.

I remember when the trans-Pacific partnership was a terrible deal and wasn't worth signing on to but when we relabelled it the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, all of a sudden it got to be a good deal.

I think the most important thing is not the content but the label. Perhaps that's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but it was quite an interesting process to watch. The transformation of the TTP into a good deal by a relabelling of the agreement still puzzles me to this day.

We're facing two crises in Canada and around the world. One is COVID and the other is climate change.

From our point of view, it strikes us that rethinking the whole notion of trade agreements under the wing of these two crises is a very important process, because under COVID, remember, in the early days, we had all kinds of problems because we didn't have enough manufacturing capacity in Canada. We were having to get our personal protective equipment from other countries; the N95 masks had to be manufactured outside of Canada.

The Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, said we're never going to let that happen again, we're going to develop Canadian manufacturing capacity. Although Mr. Ford and I aren't on the same page on many things, that seems to me to be a very important point. Why would we be relying on other countries for so much of what we need in Canada instead of developing our own capacity? To develop our own capacity, even for protective equipment, it may mean violating some of the terms of the existing trade deal, and we have to accept that. Those trade deals prevent countries from looking after their own economy.

The second is the climate crisis. Does it really still make sense for us to be exporting our resources to other countries so that they can make it into product and sell it back to us, all the while having transportation costs and the cost to the environment of all that trade back and forth? Surely we should be at least revisiting the notion. For us to continue to manufacture a limited number of things and sell them and then import everything else is dangerous to the climate, and surely we should be thinking about that.

While I'm talking about COVID, Mr. Yussuff just mentioned that we need to make sure that we don't have ISDS clauses. I'm sure the committee knows that, as a result of ISDS in the Trans-Pacific Partnership and CETA, we have bucketfuls of cases ready to go. Somebody's shaking their head but that happens to be a fact. I've read from several different law firms about the fact that they have a whole bunch of ISDS cases ready to go against countries that dared to close down their economy under COVID, and they label it. They say that if you had to close down your businesses because of COVID there may be an ISDS case there. If you had rent relief imposed by the government, there may be an ISDS case there. That's not coming from some left-wing radical lunatic, that's coming from the law firms that are poised to file those cases.

We not only need to make sure that we never sign on to another ISDS clause, we have to double back and make sure that we're protected under the ones that we've already signed on to.

There's an assumption so far this morning that trade deals are pretty good things and they're automatically good, and they're good because we say they're good, but I want to ask a question. What do trade deals do?

They weaken democracy for sure, because they're always negotiated in secret and they bind governments and say that there's a bunch of things that governments can no longer do. They increase income inequality. Every study that's ever been done about income inequality includes trade deals as one of the major features of it.

They endanger public services because every trade deal has a ratchet clause that you can privatize but once you've privatized you can't move backwards to bring it back into the public sector.

Whether we can develop new public services after signing onto CETA and the new improved Trans-Pacific Partnership is an open question.

They give corporations more rights to challenge governments than citizens of the country have.

They endanger our environment and they kill jobs.

Do they increase trade? If we have all those negative effects, is there anything positive that we can say?

Several studies have indicated that trade increases with countries that we don't have great deals with just as much as it does with countries we do. There's no empirical evidence anywhere that trade deals actually improve trade. There is a lot of evidence that trade increases with or without a trade deal. Sometimes we get more increases where we don't have a deal.

What's the evidence that a trade deal is good for the economy? We lived under NAFTA for however many years—far too long. Thousands of manufacturing jobs left. Hundreds of Canadian factories closed. Wages stagnated. Is that the good part?

There are a lot of ways in which NAFTA was a dangerous mistake for the Canadian economy. In what way was it a good deal? Where's the empirical study that says we got some benefits from signing on to the original NAFTA?

The Canada-U.S. one—or the United States Marine Corps one, as Trump would call it—is too new to have the empirical evidence. We went into it assuming that we absolutely needed to protect an agreement that had never been proven to be all that valid in the first place.

CETA has been studied. It hasn't been studied...well, remember when we were being told what a great deal CETA was? There were going to be thousands and thousands of jobs created and a gazillion increases in the gross domestic product. Mr. Trump would have been proud of the way that CETA was sold in the first place. They were specious claims that had no validity at all.

There have been real studies of what CETA is going to do. A UN researcher and a Delft University economist report that CETA will eliminate 227,000 jobs by 2023. A lot of those jobs are going to be in Canada, unfortunately. Several thousand of them are going to be Canadian jobs. They predict that as a result, CETA will drive down wages again even though wages have stagnated for so many years.

Competitive pressures will cause unemployment, inequality and welfare losses. They basically say that this factor has to be part of the informed assessment of any trade deal.

There might be one or two things I've said so far that may be slightly provocative. That's a possibility, so I want to make sure I leave time for people to throw darts at me.

Let me just say that I completely agree with Hassan's description of what needs to be in trade deals. We can't have any more ISDS. If we're going to be part of a trade deal, we have to have an obligation to fight climate change, not just to live up to a country's own rules. It can't be just be paying lip service to climate change. If we're going to make a trade deal that's going to make climate change worse by increasing trade, then at least we've got to factor in some compensating measures that countries have to take to bring climate change under control.

What about enforceable labour rights? I sat through so many meetings where we were told that CETA had the best labour rights that any agreement had ever had, which was true except for the little detail that they weren't enforceable. That's just not acceptable any longer.

We need to respect gender and indigenous rights. We need to make sure that regulatory co-operation doesn't mean making sure that we go down to the lowest common denominator, but that we go up to the highest common denominator.

We have to exempt public services from any trade deal going forward, including with the U.K. There should be no reason for public services in the U.K. or in Canada to be on the block as a result of a new trade deal.

Those are some of the things that need to be in it. Could we possibly reiterate—for the umpteenth time—that trade deals negotiated in secret are not a good idea? The whole process needs to be public, so that the public can tell what's being done in their name.

Thank you for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Judy Sgro]

Thank you very much to all the witnesses.

We'll move on to Ms. Gray now, please, for six minutes.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to all of the witnesses who are here today.

I'd like to pose my first questions to Mr. Agnew of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce wrote a joint letter with the Confederation of British Industry, your counterpart in the United Kingdom, to the government on September 21 of this year, explaining that the clock was ticking on a trade deal. That was about two months ago. What prompted you to write that letter?

[Mark Agnew]

What prompted us to write the letter was simply that December 31 is rapidly approaching. We have a domestic legislative process that needs to follow the conclusion of any deal, and time is running short now. It was running short then when we wrote the letter. Certainly, if you're a business that needs to lock in pricing contracts for January 1 for your exports, you want to know what the tariff is that you may be paying, so that's why we wrote the letter: to underscore the urgency of completing this agreement.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Have you seen any outreach from the minister or from the minister's office looking for input from businesses as they negotiate right now with the United Kingdom?

[Mark Agnew]

In juxtaposition to what you might see under, say, Canada's negotiation with ASEAN where there was a formal Gazette notice, to my knowledge there has not been any formal Gazette notice for the U.K. process. I will say that both the minister's office and the departmental officials at GAC have certainly been responsive whenever we've contacted them seeking an update on the file.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

That's really interesting. It's one thing to be responsive. It's another thing to be proactive and to actually go out to look for information as you're going into those negotiations, so that's quite interesting.

Recently, the Prime Minister made statements that the United Kingdom doesn't have the bandwidth and lacks experience to negotiate with Canada. U.K. international trade ministers denied this, and we see them negotiating with other countries and signing trade deals. Would you say that comments like this from our Prime Minister are not really helpful right now?

[Mark Agnew]

I think that any time you're in a negotiation, there's going to be a lot of heated rhetoric. I still remember what someone said to me about CETA, about how when you get to the end, there's drama both real and manufactured. Whether this is real or manufactured, that's not for me to say—I'm not in the room—but I think we need to put our nose to the grindstone on this, set aside the accusations on both sides, and focus on actually getting a deal done because that's what businesses want: certainty for January 1.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

I saw recently that the Canadian Chamber of Commerce is a joint signatory to a document called “Strengthening Canadian Supply Chain Resiliency”. You actually talked about some of the points today in your opening statement. There's a section in there about trade agreements and resolving non-tariff barriers. Have you heard whether the government is negotiating some of these non-tariff barriers with the United Kingdom? Are you concerned about this?

[Mark Agnew]

As I understand it, the non-tariff barriers have been discussed so far at an EU level, given that the U.K. hasn't fully divorced itself from the EU rule book. It will, as I understand it, copy over the EU rule book on January 1. What we're hoping to see is that we'll be able to pick up those discussions with the U.K. as soon as possible at the beginning of next year because they have been a problem for businesses looking to take advantage of CETA in the EU-28.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Which potential tariffs would you be most concerned with? I know that there are a number of industries that this could potentially affect, and you've written about this a little bit. However, I'm wondering if you could maybe expand for us today on which are of most concern for you if we don't secure an agreement by the end of the year.

[Mark Agnew]

As a multisectoral association, I appreciate my members' concerns equally across all industries, so I wouldn't want to start singling out particular ones. I think the ones that I had noted in my remarks around lobster, vehicles, beef, plastics.... Those are the ones that have certainly come to mind and that we are hearing some concerns about.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

With the U.K. being the second-largest market and a major trading partner for us for foreign investment, are you concerned that not having a transitional agreement in place could significantly harm these cross-border investments that we've seen?

[Mark Agnew]

Yes. When you're looking at how companies might decide to structure their business, investment and exports can go hand in hand. Certainly, what you might see in a U.K.-Canada context will actually be compounded by the U.K.'s divorce from the EU where Canadian companies have set up shop in the U.K. and used that as a base to access continental Europe. The U.K.-EU discussion isn't necessarily our dog to fight—we're not there in the room—but the compounding effect could be quite problematic for companies.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Do any of your members have any specific examples around that? Have you heard of some areas that are maybe of higher concern than are others?

[Mark Agnew]

There are none that I would be able to talk about in a public forum like this.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Okay. One of the other things you talked about was the Canadian trade commissioner service and the opportunity for trade promotion. Have you heard of this as something that's discussed, and could you expand on that a little bit?

[Mark Agnew]

Do you mean in the context of the U.K. or with the EU and CETA?