International Trade committee  I'm somewhat aware of those numbers. That's a report that is fairly old at this point in time. It's really a question of what transpires, what the details of this agreement are, and how we are able to benefit from those, so I'm not going to put a lot of weight on those numbers at this point in time.

International Trade committee  The response to that is there are several ways in which is it changed, and has changed. Are we where we should be at this point in time in terms of cost in Canada? Probably not. There is still some distance to go, but if you take, for instance, our productivity from 2009 through 2012, it has actually increased by 22%.

International Trade committee  I'm not saying that it would further increase the trade deficit in autos. I would say in the initial stages there will probably be a continued imbalance. The former ambassador spoke about competition. We believe we can compete in any place and any market around the world. Again we have to have fair access to those markets.

International Trade committee  Plants are already undergoing an evolution. The new Ford announcement for instance is geared to a product that is intended for the global market. That means having an awareness of the product in that market and whether it's going to be acceptable and successful. That's a question of putting in place the innovation necessary in terms of advanced technologies in manufacturing to become more productive, and that includes quality and so forth.

International Trade committee  Mexico is part of NAFTA.

International Trade committee  I'd certainly love to comment on that. Quite frankly, if that decision hadn't been made, and had the hard political decision not been made to provide support to General Motors and Chrysler, not just those two companies wouldn't be here today or in Canada, but we probably wouldn't have an industry here that hadn't gone through extreme upheaval and hardship with many more jobs lost.

International Trade committee  I don't think any company or country would want to go the lowest common denominator. I don't think that's on the table. There is, you know, opportunity for discussion around standards, homogeny, as I talked about. If we had global standards, that is the optimum. Where all vehicles can be one standard, could enter any market around the globe, is the penultimate goal here.

International Trade committee  Mexico hasn't come as far as we have to date, relative to both the extent of the standards that we have and the enforcement of the standards that we have, but they are coming along. Certainly in discussions I've had with my Mexican counterpart, they are moving forward in that same direction.

International Trade committee  Where it helps Canada is, again, we're looking at global platforms here. If you want to be competitive, you want to maximize your production and capacity utilization. It hasn't been a well-known fact, or people haven't recognized that. But when we went through 2008 and 2009, through the deep recession—and I've been around for 30 years in the auto industry, I've never seen a trough as deep as that, with the extent of the damage it had on the economy and in the auto industry—we took out capacity so that we could maximize capacity utilization.

International Trade committee  That's certainly the ratio that would exist now, even with the Canadian tariff in place. The key here for us is from Canada, from our Canadian plants, as global automakers.... People refer to Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors, as the D3 with a certain connotation that we're very myopic in our export aspirations and so forth.

International Trade committee  The answer to that is it's evolving. This is why I mentioned the fact that appropriate tariff reduction schedules are needed so that we can take time to evolve. Clearly, we have been structured to service the North American market primarily. We're highly integrated. That will evolve, and as it evolves we're hoping that through these agreements we can open up new opportunities.

International Trade committee  I'm glad it's affectionately.

International Trade committee  The whole area of rules of origin...determining originating materials is done through different methodologies. You have a regional value content; you can have what is called value cost; or you can have net cost. It's beyond me to get into a huge amount of detail on this. But whether we can use the existing net cost methodology with averaging, for instance, is one area where clearly it's being considered, I believe, based on what we've read in the agreement in principle document.

International Trade committee  I think in the early stages of this agreement it is indeed the objective of the European manufacturers to ship more vehicles into Canada and North America. That is indeed the case now. There is about a 10:1 differential. In other words, for every one we ship into Europe, we get 10 into Canada now.

International Trade committee  In terms of the European CO2 standards to which you refer, and we call them greenhouse gas standards, because our companies already have production in Europe, they must abide by the rules in Europe. In North America a huge transition is now under way. We are already more stringent on smog-related emission standards than Europe is.