International Trade committee  Yes, from my perspective, you've described that feeling very clearly. When the U.S. put on those tariffs against Canada on steel and aluminum on national security grounds, when we have such a close alliance with the U.S. on defence issues and anything to do with national security

International Trade committee  Well, we did have discussions. There was no definition of what a meaningful surge would be. We have had a number of discussions at a technical level with U.S. authorities since the lifting of the tariffs on steel and aluminum. We've talked about the trade that has been occurring.

International Trade committee  I think it would all depend on if the U.S. were to consider taking some kind of action against our steel and aluminum tariffs, and if they were going to justify it on national security considerations, as they did in the past. If we felt that those justifications were unjust, then

International Trade committee  You were.

International Trade committee  I'm fairly confident that I can provide you with that assurance, because we—not our group, but the chief economist's group—are very close to finishing that economic assessment. You mentioned the U.S. assessment that was done. We examined that closely when it came out, and it di

International Trade committee  Sure.

International Trade committee  Absolutely not.

International Trade committee  I think that when you look at the issue of market access, what was negotiated is fairly limited. There were no real market access gains in the industrial sector. There were no real market access gains in the fisheries sector. The only area where there were any significant market

International Trade committee  Yes, the government can decide when the implementation of the agreement will take place. I think the provisions in the agreement are actually fairly clear though. I think you're familiar with this. It would be the first day of the third month after the last party ratifies the agr

International Trade committee  It would be at the beginning of August, yes.

International Trade committee  I think that this wasn't simply a matter of the U.S. wishing to eliminate investor-state dispute settlement across the board in NAFTA. What the U.S. was mainly concerned about was eliminating investor-state dispute settlement in relation to Mexico. Their view was that it actually

International Trade committee  I'm not sure that we ever explicitly stated that. We did have an interest in looking at investor-state dispute settlement in the context of this agreement, because, as you probably know, there have been far more cases taken by U.S. investors against Canadian policies than cases t

International Trade committee  I think what we've discovered in recent years is that we've seen the difficulty of the multilateral effort to try to move forward on these types of issues. There has not been a sufficient amount of agreement to converge on elements on a multilateral basis that we could include in

International Trade committee  Well yes, there is a difference in the most recent obligations taken on, as of December 10. There will be a requirement on steel that, after seven years, auto manufacturers that are purchasing steel will have to ensure that it's smelted and poured within North America. With res

International Trade committee  One of the core elements that we spent a lot of time focusing on during this negotiation was not to simply look at what's in the existing NAFTA and extrapolate some of that when it came to traditional areas like goods, services and investment. We wanted to modernize it by introdu