International Trade committee  Thank you very much, and thank you for the invitation to appear. As you heard, this is a decisive year for the Doha negotiations. The expiry of the U.S. fast track negotiating authority in July 2007 sets an effective deadline of the end of this year, at the latest early next yea

International Trade committee  I don't agree that we would have chaos. The WTO treaties would still be in effect. The dispute settlement system would continue to work. There's a sense of the bicycle theory, that you have to keep ever expanding trade treaty rules, that if the bicycle stops, it will fall over.

International Trade committee  Just in response to that, I think it's very clear that the United States, and particularly the Europeans, have linked movement in agriculture to movement in NAMA and services. In fact, the Europeans have called for a meeting on services exclusively by a core group of ministers to

International Trade committee  That qualifier, that the government will not make commitments in public education, concerns me, because commitments covering private education would certainly affect the public system. Educational providers such as universities offer training courses in competition with private p

International Trade committee  Yes, there is a paper and some material I will pass to the clerk. In 1995, and later in an addendum to the GATS in 1997, Canada covered a whole range of financial services, including insurance. In the case of auto insurance, they took a country-specific exemption--it's called a

International Trade committee  A short comment on that. It's always possible the trade promotion authority or fast track could be extended, but I think in the current political climate in the United States that is not very likely, and I don't believe anyone will want to negotiate seriously with the United Stat

International Trade committee  To address the issue of the adequacy of the governmental authority exclusion in the GATS, article I(3)(c), I don't believe—and this view is shared by many—that this is an effective exemption. It's certainly not a full exemption for public services. It states that services provide

International Trade committee  No, I haven't seen an enormous change. My understanding is that the mandate has not changed, and I don't know if that's because Canada hasn't gotten to it or they've endorsed the position of the former government in a serious way.

International Trade committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the committee for the invitation. Thank you to my fellow presenters. I can certainly vouch for the importance of--

International Trade committee  Now that we've cleared up the background noise, which I was also hearing, what I had begun to say was that I can certainly vouch for the importance of and the increasing interchange between Koreans and Canadians. My nephew is about to marry a young Korean woman this Christmas. T

International Trade committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Both members have raised some very important points. I think the data on trade, particularly in automotive, with the 153:1 ratio, speaks to the extreme difficulty in selling cars into the Korean market. I am not certain that a trade agreement can actuall

International Trade committee  Thank you for those excellent questions. On the intellectual property rights issue, this is something very much under the radar and it has not been getting nearly enough attention in the deal. This is a serious break from Canadian past practice. We have not negotiated TRIPS-plu

International Trade committee  I'm not an expert on the details. I would just simply reiterate that Korea has a history of a very active industrial policy, and even after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, they adopted a very deliberate export-led growth strategy and very successfully pulled themselves up by the

International Trade committee  Thank you for the questions. I think you have put your finger on a very important issue, this unbalanced and unhealthy relationship, from the Canadian point of view, where we have relatively low job and value-added content to our main exports, and the Koreans have a very high va

International Trade committee  Sure, thank you. In terms of provisions that we would not want to adopt from the U.S.-Korea agreement, the intellectual property rights provisions that I refer to, data exclusivity and so-called linkage provisions--I know those are complicated terms—that would push up the price