Thank you.
Good afternoon everyone. It's morning here in Singapore. My name is Wayne Farmer, and I'm president of the Canada-ASEAN Business Council. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today, Madam Chair and members of the Standing Committee on International Trade.
I'll give a brief background. The CABC is a private sector-led not-for-profit that was established in 2012 and headquartered here in Singapore. Our mission is to build trade and commerce between Canada and ASEAN and the 10 member states within ASEAN. We represent over 60 Canadian and ASEAN businesses trading between the two regions. We've been a very key advocate for increasing the Canada-ASEAN trade flow, recognizing the immense potential that ASEAN presents for Canada and vice versa.
We've been very active in working with Canadian governments in the ASEAN member states to get to the point where two free trade negotiations were formally launched in 2021, which are the Canada-ASEAN FTA and the Canada-Indonesia CEPA.
I also want to note that it's taken quite a lot of time to get to this point, which is the nature of these discussions. I've been involved in volunteering with this for almost 10 years—