International Trade committee  That's a good question.

International Trade committee  I'm not the member for Eglinton—Lawrence, so I have a different perspective here. I would say that it's very important for this government to show, especially the Democratic Congress, that we're serious about this deal and that we're independently going with a ratification process.

International Trade committee  I don't know how you reopen an agreement.

International Trade committee  Fair enough.

International Trade committee  Our members were frankly surprised that we were able to get an agreement that had higher regional value content. It's a very straight line between the RVC level and business prospects. There was a positive assessment of this deal. The only question is, are we going to ratify it or not?

International Trade committee  Do you know, I think the naked American objective here was to do exactly that, to repatriate jobs from Mexico, not all of it fact-based and frankly, not a lot of it reversible without hurting American interests and objectives. Those are American companies that invested in Mexico.

International Trade committee  Suppliers don't build plants or lines on spec. Either you have the contract or you don't. Of course all my members are bidding very aggressively on the new volume. The fact is that volume will be a 25% addition writ large. It won't be spread. Everybody is under the 25%. The winners may get 26% or 50% more volume.

International Trade committee  Getting this right is important because the MFN tariff is only 2.5%, but the American intention, I think...using the section 232 tariffs and going back to WTO, our expectation in the industry is that this number is going to go way up.

International Trade committee  On his way into office, he said he was looking for a border tax on all goods coming in. He then turned around and threatened very specific companies like Ford and BMW, putting a tax specifically on.... Whether he could do it or not was not the question. The markets reacted to the fact that the President of the United States was threatening some type of action.

International Trade committee  The auto side letters are a funny instrument. On one hand, from a purely academic point of view, I would not like to see us in those types of discussions, whereby we concede some extra agreement against a threat that I thought was an improper use of legislation. Others have called it illegal.

International Trade committee  Companies take a longer-term approach than a single term. That being said, the power of a tweet from the President has been demonstrated over the last couple of years to cause marked confusion. I view the Oshawa news the same way that you do. Lots of our member companies built generations of business out there.

International Trade committee  I think it's a valid concern in general and I think the original American proposal was 85% regional value content, 15% U.S. domestic content, tracing parts down to their raw materials. We said that the most important perspective from a supplier point of view is if our OEM customers were going to pass, then we were going to get hurt there.

International Trade committee  Sure, let me just finish the one I have here.

International Trade committee  I represent the parts suppliers' interests in Canada, but those head office interests, the GNP interests for major companies like Magna, Martinrea and Linamar, they have investments in the U.S. and in Mexico that in some cases are bigger than their Canadian interests.

International Trade committee  In Mexico, in meetings with the President of Mexico and with the secretary of the economy and the secretary of foreign affairs, our message there was that we—Canadian companies—own 150 plants that employ 43,500 Mexican workers as well. So if this doesn't work out and we end up on the other side of a big tariff wall here, we're speaking to them as Mexican investors and employers.