International Trade committee  Yes, that's fine. There's no problem.

International Trade committee  Thank you very much, and thank you for the invitation to appear before you today. I’m going to start by providing you with some context for these negotiations. Then I'll outline some of the key steps in the negotiations and the timelines going forward, and finally I'll provide y

International Trade committee  Could I respond to that? If the EU expands to include further members, those new members would be subject to exactly the same obligations that the European Union is taking on under this potential free trade agreement.

International Trade committee  No, we don't anticipate that we would be able to get quite as far as the Schengen agreement, which applies between the European Union and a number of other European countries, including Switzerland and a few others. Our main focus in labour mobility is more on the business side.

International Trade committee  Yes, we have been working very closely with the provinces and territories in designing the proposal that we will put in front of the European Union. That proposal will apply to all the provinces and territories. Our biggest challenge on this issue will be getting all the EU mem

International Trade committee  Sure. The European Union does have a much stronger regime for copyright protection, for enforcement of intellectual property rights, and for a number of other areas as well. The government has looked at the EU model, the U.S. model, and others in designing the bill that was put

International Trade committee  Thank you. To respond to the first part of your question, we made the original commitment to try to do this negotiation as quickly as we could, partly because we've seen a lot of negotiations, including some of our own, that have dragged on for years. And we both wanted to get t

International Trade committee  We may yet get to some of those obstacles you describe, but the approach to date has worked quite effectively. It's mainly a matter of spending a lot of time with the provinces and territories, and talking about what kinds of priorities we have in common to fit into our overall s

International Trade committee  It's actually a bit of a two-way dialogue, using both of those kinds of approaches. The provinces have come to us with an indication of what they would be prepared to put on the table; we've gone to them with a notional target of what we think would be needed for an effective neg

International Trade committee  Yes, it is.

International Trade committee  Well, we're not looking to have a one-size-fits-all approach to this. In some cases we do expect we will harmonize our regulations with the European Union. In other cases they may harmonize theirs to ours, but those will probably be fairly limited cases. The more common outcome w

International Trade committee  I don't think they would be doing that across the board, by any means, but I think we will be looking for accommodation in various areas, as will they. Europeans don't universally tend to have higher standards. When it comes to things like auto standards, for example, their stan

International Trade committee  We haven't had any discussions about an actual model going forward, but we have been consulting closely with civil society. I've been having a discussion with a broad group of civil society representatives after every negotiating round, and they've certainly made their views clea

International Trade committee  Yes, we have. We're certainly aware of the level of interest in that particular issue from the east. Some of our highest priorities in the goods area generally include wood and wood products. We've certainly made that clear to the European Union. The other thing we made clear is

International Trade committee  I could answer that one. No, we have never seen anywhere near this kind of involvement of provincial or territorial officials in any previous negotiation. I think that's the case, not just in Canada, but it would be the same among other countries that have the same kind of federa