Mr. Muys, it's a very important part of the mandate I have as the intergovernmental affairs minister for the reasons you said. It does seem strange that there are...and every Liberal and Conservative government for the last 20 years has made significant progress, but we don't seem to be able to get the fine series of exemptions to the Canada free trade accord that was signed five or six years ago. There are still schedules attached to it that list a whole series of exemptions where different governments advance a particular reason why we can't have across the country a true free trade context.
To your point, you're absolutely right. I share entirely your connection of that issue to some of the fragility of supply chains that we have seen during COVID and certainly during some of the events of the last number of weeks.
I remain quite optimistic. My colleague François-Philippe Champagne and I have a number of provincial and territorial ministers who would be our counterparts on the internal trade file. A number of premiers have kept internal trade as an area of responsibility for themselves. I have had extremely encouraging conversations with Premier Kenny, Premier Houston, Premier Ford, a number of premiers who really want us to finally drop the last remaining number of barriers. It would add immediately to the GDP of the country. It would also secure some of the supply chains.
It does seem rather bizarre that we could renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with the Trump administration in the United States, and we haven't collectively as a federal government and provincial governments found a way to make our own domestic market truly free.
A final point is that the Government of Canada does not come to that conversation with clean hands, in the sense that we as a national government still have a few remaining barriers that the finance minister and I are working on eliminating. If we want to speak to some provinces that are perhaps less enthusiastic than the ones I mentioned, the Government of Canada has to be able to show what we have done within our jurisdiction. Financial services and food and agri-food industries are the obvious ones that keep getting raised.
I'm enthusiastic about the progress we can make in the next few months.