International Trade committee  Thank you, Madam Chair and honourable members, for the invitation to speak as part of the committee's U.K. study. It's a pleasure to be back here and to see you all again virtually. As the committee's members will appreciate, the U.K. is a significant trading partner for Canada.

International Trade committee  It is precisely those types of things—ports and airports. This isn't anything new, and I'm not trying to pretend it is. As always, the reality for these infrastructure funds is that the demand way outstrips the supply of money available. This is about putting more cash into the national trade corridors fund to open it up again for organizations to be able to tap into to build those projects.

International Trade committee  We're definitely talking about substantive value-added transformation. Precisely what you talked about is some of the problems we would have with the regime as it stands today, and loosening those rules to enable more production would build up our domestic capacity in the manufacturing sector and certainly create jobs for Canadians in the process.

International Trade committee  I agree with what Mathew said on the SMEs. To build on that, I would say use the regulatory co-operation mechanisms. It's great if tariffs come down, but if the regulatory measures aren't aligned or they keep out a company, then tariff liberalization is a moot point. We saw that in the case of CETA, for example, and some of the agriculture issues that Canadian companies have run into.

International Trade committee  We're just starting our work to dig into this now in more detail. I mean, the headline message is that the current rules are best described as FTZ-like policies. I think when a company comes in and they talk about FTZs, they're having an expectation of much more flexibility with what they can do in terms of value-added processing in that area.

International Trade committee  I'll maybe kick it off before handing it over to Matt. Certainly the World Trade Organization has done quite a lot of interesting work through its leading indicators on what they're seeing around the world in transportation and logistics, so absolutely there will be a decrease.

International Trade committee  Maybe I'll just start it off. We haven't done a quantitative analysis of the impacts. It's being said that we have quantitative numbers. It's what the Canada Border Services Agency is already producing domestically. However, in terms of the actual impact, it's quite varied in terms of everything from a Canadian company that needs to, for example, have a buyer come here in order to, say, inspect a product and meet critical attainment milestones that are linked to payments, to bringing in, say, pilots who need training on flight simulators.

International Trade committee  The first thing I would say is that the statements we've been producing have been a fantastic initial effort. What we're saying very much is to build on that and take them to the next level. Those statements, at the end of the day, are not legally binding on the countries that make them, so I think the next level up is to say that we've agreed to this in principle as a statement, and now let's actually put our money where our mouth is and put some legal text in writing that we as a country would be willing to abide by in an international legal treaty sense.

International Trade committee  Yes, I am very much aligned with what Mathew has said. There's a lot under our direct control that we can do to have it make fiscal and financial sense for companies. At the end of the day, a company can't be running at a loss permanently. For example, how can we have capital cost allowances such that, if you want to build a capital-intensive facility here, it's going to actually pay off for the company that has made that investment?

International Trade committee  Thank you very much, Madam Chair and members, for the invitation to speak here at committee today. Although it's quite common for stakeholders to reference the critical or timely nature of a given study, I think this one really is. International trade is critical to Canada, and our relationships with both the U.S. and U.K. are critical as well.