Thank you for your question.
The information is there. I think specifically on the TPP initial negotiations, I think it was the decision of the negotiating team—the government at the time—that there were priorities other than protecting vehicle access in exchange for gains in other sectors. I think it was the same with the government that closed it.
I think what's really important to understand is that while we agreed to disagree with the government on what the threat was from Japan.... We also had the Japanese investment here. Toyota and Honda were extremely invested in the Canadian market and were making a million cars a year, which was half of our production. There were some advantages there that kind of balanced things off. However, we included Vietnam in the CPTPP, which the government dismissed at the time because Vietnam and Malaysia, for example, were just parts suppliers like Canada. There was a balance with Japan, but they weren't worried about the Vietnamese threat. Here we are now, five years later, and the Vietnamese make cars and import them to Canada, tariff-free in part, because of the deal we signed that didn't see any emerging threat or consider it to be a risk for the market share of Canadian producers.
VinFast makes great vehicles. They are competitive and they look good. They're designed by Pininfarina, which is Ferrari's designer. They are priced competitively against Tesla, the market leader. They are sold directly, past distributor agreements, in places like shopping centres in Toronto.
When we get a chance to review the CPTPP, I think the first thing I would look at is the balance of cars made in Canada and sold in Japan. I'll tell you there will be none, or 300 or 400, versus maybe 150,000 here. Then look at the new Vietnamese threat. There will be zero going from Canada to Vietnam and there will be a good cohort of cars sold by VinFast here.
I think that should be a case study lesson for the next time we renegotiate CPTPP or we dismiss the potential of other trading partners emerging to compete with us in one of the most important sectors in this economy.