Thank you, Mr. Chair. I won't take the five minutes. I'll give a bit of a preamble and then ask just one question.
First of all, I think you've gotten off a little bit easy with today's committee, mostly because we had requested that you come, as you know, a few weeks ago and we had two of your representatives show up. Being in opposition, we don't get a lot of time to sit here and question deputy ministers, and it's important that all deputy ministers show up. Regarding a lot of what we talked about today, you weren't there at the time of the audit. However, you were there to make the decision to not bring yourself to this committee and to send two representatives. I would recommend that when and every time you come back before this committee, that you come back, because not only has that set us back but we get only two hours in this committee meeting. That's now set us back. We had to cancel that meeting. There was the Auditor General's time. We've now had to push our entire agenda back the equivalent of a week because of that. There were no comments at the beginning about that, and I guess at this point, we're kind of into the committee, so it's kind of late to apologize, but I just want to highlight how important it is that deputy ministers show up before this committee.
That said, I'll move on to my question. You're welcome to address some of that in your answer.
I'm reading from paragraph number eight—and Ms. Shanahan was the first to bring this up—in Mr. Ferguson's statement today, where he said:
...Transport Canada was aware that child seat anchorages could fail under certain conditions, but it had not proposed a new regulation or issued an advisory by the audit completion date. The Department stated that introducing a unique-to-Canada requirement for anchorage strength in passenger vehicles would be detrimental to trade.
To me and, I imagine, to a lot of parents across the country, that's a pretty callous statement about your department's recognizing the impacts on trade. A lot of today's discussion has been about how you react to the trade implications through the U.S., but you gave us one example from approximately a decade ago of how the United States reacted to us. I'm curious as to the percentage of cases in which we forge the direction, but also is there a connection between your department and International Trade? Is there at least, I would hope, a monthly meeting of some sort to connect the two departments? It seems here that your department highlights a safety mandate first, but your department largely reacts to what the international trade department does, with the exception of that one example.
I'll leave it at that for you to comment. Thank you, sir.
That's my time.