International Trade committee  Not fully countercyclical, but it has buffers that other economies do not have.

International Trade committee  Well, I'm not an expert on all of those issues, but there are privacy issues, I think, and issues around the control of domain and location of service, and so on, that don't translate quite so easily into the traditional thinking around opening markets. There are some very huge

International Trade committee  Thank you.

International Trade committee  I'm told that the negotiations are taking place in parallel and that the bilateral talks are not being held back in any significant way because of TPP. That said, we're still in the very early stages in the negotiations with Japan. I would be very surprised if Japan plays all its

International Trade committee  No, because it's not part of the TPP. It would be unfair. This is what I mean by not trying to put special restraints on China. If in fact human rights have not been part of the discussion so far in the TPP, why would we do that to make a special exception of China?

International Trade committee  There are more people learning English in China than there are people in England. Let me ask you something. It's very simple. If you're competing with someone abroad and that person knows your language fluently and you don't know that person's language who has the advantage? To

International Trade committee  Yes, I would, and let me be clear. I'm not saying that Mandarin should be mandatory. We already have official bilingualism. French is a very important language for Canadians to master, perhaps even before they master a third language, but the option should be presented. When you

International Trade committee  Sir, I'm talking about the Vancouver school district. It's at Oak and 57th.

International Trade committee  No, there will continue to be demand for coal, copper, zinc, and iron.

International Trade committee  China has to go through the same process and hurdles in joining TPP that we went through and we went through a lot of hurdles with such a diverse group already in the membership including, as someone has pointed out, Vietnam, which is an even more tightly controlled economy. I th

International Trade committee  We don't know what the behind-the-scenes discussions were but it took us—I can't remember now—14 months at least to get admission and a number of times we were pushed back. I would imagine we had to make undertakings to aspire to a very high level of liberalization, including in

International Trade committee  No, you look at the track record. The last 40 years have seen remarkable privatization and globalization in the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy in 1980 was 85% controlled by the state sector, today it's only 5%, and continuing in that—

International Trade committee  Today it's only 5% controlled by the state. State-led production in China is only about 5% of total production. It was the reverse in 1980. The Chinese government understands very well that if they want to move from a lower middle-income economy to a middle, or upper middle-inc

International Trade committee  If I could go to the point both of you have touched upon now, the importance of services, I think we are at an inflection point in Asian economies where growth is going to be driven increasingly not by investment and by exports but by domestic consumption. Economies such as China

International Trade committee  We work very closely with the ministry and with all interested parties. We've organized a number of events with Minister Fast and with the department, and I've taken part in most of the post-negotiation debriefings that are held by the chief negotiator and her team. We have as mu