International Trade committee  We're actually still in the fairly early stages of trying to determine what we can do. Most of the legislation is fairly straightforward, and once we get approval for the legislation from the House, we can move quickly through regulations. I would say that's for the bulk of the kinds of changes we have to make.

International Trade committee  Yes, we do, actually. Certainly, when we first started the negotiation, we did hear some expressions of concern that as we were lowering the tariffs it would be easier for exports of cars from the European Union to come into Canada. Our thought at the time was that it would more likely have an impact of displacing some of the other cars coming from other sources into Canada, but I think, as we found over time, from the auto part side, in many ways we tend to have more of an advantage than the EU does.

International Trade committee  That's a good question. From the perspective of trade negotiators, I think we're very much aware that we can negotiate the best agreement that there could be, but if nobody takes advantage of it, it's not worth very much. Probably the most important part is getting it right in terms of giving the information that is needed, particularly to small and medium-sized enterprises, and helping them with any kind of advice they might need or with further information about accessing the EU market.

International Trade committee  Do you mean a plan to inform Canadians?

International Trade committee  At this point, we haven't, and the main reason we haven't is that we're finding it very difficult to conduct that kind of analysis, mainly because the types of changes we will see with the changes to the Patent Act, particularly for the additional two years of protection, are not likely to kick in until the agreement has been in place for probably eight years or so—at least for the majority of the changes.

International Trade committee  Again, I think we want to make sure.... This would be more for Health Canada than it would be for us, but I think that if we can anticipate that this is going to happen, we would certainly want to give people a heads-up. I think the problem at this point is that we don't really know.

International Trade committee  Yes. We deliberately didn't entirely complete the appellate tribunal system when we completed the negotiations, partly because we wanted to see how this would develop over a period of time, and we wanted a bit more time to be able to think about how this might function. There have been an increasing number of discussions internationally with other countries about how an appellate mechanism could work as well, so I think we have a fair amount of time to start working on that, although we'll be starting very soon.

International Trade committee  If it were to be removed entirely—and obviously a lot of things would have to happen before that happened—first of all, that would have to be an EU decision. Member states can't do it individually. If the EU came to us and said that they wanted to remove that system entirely, then we'd need to have a discussion and a bit of a negotiation at that point.

International Trade committee  I'm sorry. Increasing pressure on the...?

International Trade committee  Yes, we think it would make a large difference, particularly in those smaller companies. A lot of the larger companies can easily manage different operations in different places. Small and medium-sized enterprises have less flexibility in what they're able to do, but they will want to be able to move back and forth to be able to take advantage of the opportunities in the EU market.

International Trade committee  British Columbia was very actively engaged throughout the negotiations. They had a lot of interests. Obviously, fish and seafood was one of the interests. They had some agricultural interests. They had a lot of interest in some of the services that are of particular importance in British Columbia.

International Trade committee  On the infrastructure side, I think it's working both ways. We certainly have advantages that we can provide to Canadian infrastructure providers, but at certain levels, the EU will be able to compete on a number of the tenders that might be issued. We've found that the EU often has technology or expertise that we may not necessarily have in Canada, so we can expect that they will play a particularly useful part for us when it comes to infrastructure as well.

International Trade committee  We've been speaking quite a bit to all of the ports. Given that the most likely route of travel and the first access to Canada would come more from the east than from the west, I think the Port of Halifax and the Port of Montreal are quite interested in the kind of elevated traffic that they're going to get as a result of CETA.

International Trade committee  No. There's one in CETA as well.

International Trade committee  We can follow that process. At the same time, we have seven bilateral investment treaties with member states that are part of the EU, so we would still be able to use those during that period.