Mr. Speaker, I will be responding to the Canada-U.K. report.
I would like to express my appreciation to the analysts, the clerk and my colleagues on the Standing Committee of International Trade for their work in preparing this final report on trade between Canada and the United Kingdom, and I want to thank them.
Attached to the report is the supplementary opinion of the official opposition Conservatives. In this report, we highlight that we are pleased to see the Canada-United Kingdom Trade Continuity Agreement come into effect on April 1, 2021, though we are disappointed that the government was not able to meet the initial deadline of December 31, 2020, when the CETA's application to the United Kingdom ended. It is truly unfortunate that the government left this critical trade agreement to the final sitting week of the final month of the final year the CETA's term no longer applied to the U.K., having to sign an interim memorandum of understanding to provide trade stability due to this delay.
The Conservative Party of Canada is pleased to see recommendations in the report on negotiations for a successor Canada-U.K. trade agreement, which we hope to see begin negotiations this year, including to address gaps raised by small businesses and those in the agriculture and agri-food sectors. Conservatives support the recommendations in the report and we look forward to the government's response.
Conservatives also recognize that we were in a unique situation where we did this Canada-U.K. trade study and we also had a separate study on Bill C-18,, the Canada-United Kingdom Trade Continuity Agreement Implementation Act, where we also heard from witnesses whose testimony is regrettably not included in this report. We, in the Conservative caucus, do hope that the government takes the time to review the input from stakeholders from the Bill C-18 study, including concerns around non-tariff barriers, as well as non-indexation of frozen British pensions.