Mr. Speaker, one of the basic things in government is that the executive is charged by the legislature, by parliament, or in the case of the United States, Congress, to negotiate a treaty and work out the best terms it can bring back to the legislative bodies to ratify. The G7 includes all of our allies, but in this case, the United States signed a treaty but has not ratified it. Therefore, it is not caught in this system of having to abide by the constraints of the ATT.
Now, the U.S. has its own export and import controls. It is also one of the world's largest exporters of military equipment. Canada and Canadian manufacturers do a great deal of business with the United States. I know this because my father was a defence contractor for 30 years. He has literally worked on every single naval ship in Canada in the past 30 years. He has also worked on a great deal of American ships on behalf of the U.S. Navy, which his company was working for at the time, to provide equipment, servicing, and technical knowledge. Therefore, we do a great deal of trade with the U.S.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of jobs that depend on that specific type of trade in military equipment across our border. It important to remember there are many such manufacturers. As I said before, there is only one firearms manufacturer in Canada, which is in Ontario, but we have to remember that a lot of the information that will be collected through this registry system will be sent overseas.