Thank you very much.
It's an honour to be here in my current capacity as a business ombudsman, but also harkening back to my time as the Canadian ambassador to Ukraine at the time the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement was signed and implemented. It was designed primarily to give our commercial relations a boost, and, if anything, in terms of its negotiation, it was designed to help open up the Canadian market to Ukraine products, as well as promote Canadian exports.
We made a special effort, on the part of our development program at the time, to launch a project called the Canada-Ukraine trade and investment support project, with which Mr. Potoczny and the Canada-Ukraine Chamber of Commerce were associated. It was led primarily by The Conference Board of Canada to support Ukrainians who were suffering both from continuing warfare, which we now see is possibly surging again, but also from the problems of a transitional economy, which still hasn't worked out all the kinks.
We have seen growth in bilateral trade, but also bumps on the road. The pandemic was certainly inhibiting progress in 2020, and then we saw some rebound in 2021.
In looking at the opportunities that modernizing this agreement might bring, certainly in my time as ambassador, and now looking around at the Ukrainian economy and the issues I'm helping to resolve as a business ombudsman, you definitely see a thriving IT sector in Ukraine, which Canadian companies have been very actively tapping into.
You might think this would be problematic for the Canadian IT market or labour market. From what I've seen, however, it tends to be a net growing of the pie. As a former U.S. president might have put it, make the pie higher. The digitalization of companies, like Canadian Tire, was driven in part by innovations developed in Ukraine. It actually helped Canadian Tire increase the number of IT people employed both in Canada and Ukraine, just by making the company more digital. So there's considerable scope in the information technology services sector.
There's another area where Canadians have certainly made considerable progress in Ukraine, and that is in the insurance sector. Fairfax Financial of Canada now owns three insurance companies in Ukraine. It's the largest single player in the Ukrainian insurance space. Their companies write about $150 million worth of policies annually.
Having a framework more securely defined, in which both ground rules for investment and rules for the provision of services by companies based in either Canada or Ukraine, would help expand that sort of engagement on both sides of this trading, investment and services relationship.
I won't belabour these points anymore, and will leave it to you to ask some questions.