Mr. Speaker, I can tell the member for Mercier that I have been impressed at how much better things have gone this time than before the Seattle meeting.
This time we have seen serious progress in the parallel negotiations which have been taking place over the past two years. There have been two mini ministerial meetings in the past two months. On September 1, some 20 ministers, representing a good cross-section of opinions throughout the world, met in Mexico and the second meeting took place in Singapore in mid-October.
We will be working from a text prepared for Stuart Harbinson of Hong Kong, who is currently the chairman of the general and council. We will negotiate on the basis of a 45 paragraph text, we have already spent two weekends trying to narrow the gap between the sometimes divergent situations of certain countries.
I am optimistic in that we have worked much better than last time, but there is still a great deal of work to do before we can count on any positive result in this regard.
As for culture, our commitment is very clear: we will maintain the margin of manoeuvre of our government and of other governments, such as that of Quebec, which are doing vital work in the area of culture, to ensure that we hear from other points of view, other sensibilities.
As I said, I naturally want to hear our point of view on our own culture, but also that of other cultures in the world, which have so much to give us.