International Trade committee  Mr. Chair, it has been the Canadian government's approach in recent FTA negotiations to negotiate both labour and environment side agreements. These do indeed have different provisions, and I think that's because the government recognizes that there are different issues at stake.

International Trade committee  That's a hot-potato question; that's right. Certainly one of our objectives in negotiating the FTA was to improve our access, in particular for frozen potato products. We have negotiated so-called duty-free immediate access for frozen potato products from Canada, meaning to say

International Trade committee  Mr. Chair, perhaps I could just supplement that response a little bit. The objective in negotiating and implementing the trade agreement is not for the Canadian government to get these contracts, of course, on behalf of Canadian companies. What we are trying to do is open the d

International Trade committee  Broadly speaking, Panama, as a member of the World Trade Organization, now has commitments to all of the members of the WTO—a certain level of liberalization. Panama is allowed to go beyond that and provide preferential treatment to certain countries under free trade agreements,

International Trade committee  Yes, I can elaborate a little bit on that.

International Trade committee  Canadian companies and service providers, I think we all know, can be world leaders with respect to financial services, engineering, mining, petroleum extractive services, construction, capital projects and environmental services—those are some of the areas in which Canadian comp

International Trade committee  The information I have is that a Spanish-led consortium won the $3.1 billion contract to build the third set of locks. I believe there were other consortiums. My colleague Mr. Reeder mentioned that the Brazilians have most of the contracts to build the expansion of the canal. Ho

International Trade committee  Indeed, with respect to pork, for example, and I think you heard this from the pork industry representative last week, last year Panama imported $4.9 million worth of pork from Canada, so almost $5 million. With respect to the outcome of the U.S.-Panama agreement, broadly speakin

International Trade committee  We don't know that yet. We understand that the agreement could come into force as early as this year, but the Panamanian congress still needs to pass certain legislation in order to satisfy the U.S. This could happen as early as this month. So it's coming soon but we don't know t

International Trade committee  The Panamanian congress has already passed the required measures. They are waiting on Canada at this point.

International Trade committee  Certainly. Broadly speaking, the so-called side agreement on the environment is a high-quality agreement. It's along the model the Canadian government has negotiated with other recent FTA partners. It requires both parties, that is to say both countries signing the agreement, t

International Trade committee  Again, as I alluded to in my opening comments, our trade with Panama is small, but it's dynamic, and it's growing. You yourself referred to the growth rates. I think you heard last week from representatives of the Canadian pork industry, for example, who see a growing market ther

International Trade committee  One of our principal objectives in negotiating the FTA with Panama was to make sure that Canadian businesses all across the board had a level playing field with respect to their U.S. counterparts, in particular, given that we were negotiating at a time when the United States had

International Trade committee  Maybe to provide a more general response, we don't have figures in that regard, and to my knowledge the Canadian government hasn't done particular studies. But we are well aware, of course, that Central America is a region now that's suffering very seriously from the narco-traffi

International Trade committee  Certainly, the idea behind it is that we will increase the flow of legitimate trade in goods and services, yes.