International Trade committee  It's the same in Switzerland. We don't subsidize industries because of the change in international trade and so on. We think also, if we have trade agreements between industrialized countries, as now between Canada and the EFTA states, it is important for the industries to be competitive.

International Trade committee  As a first remark, we have a consultative committee at the EFTA level, where there are economic organizations from both sides—the business and the labour force. They also discuss these main issues--not the details, but the strategies. Also, in the Swiss Parliament, in the committees, every year we have reports about the policy of the EFTA, and in this report we have the directions, but we don't discuss details of the agreements.

International Trade committee  I had a point about our Swiss view to this question. In our country, it's very important for us to have free trade because of the international investment in our country. If we didn't have this free trade agreement, we wouldn't have this investment that we have from big international companies in our country.

International Trade committee  This government had negotiations for a short time with the United States about the possibility of coming to an agreement, and we stopped these negotiations because we had agricultural issues that were not at the same level of discussion with the United States. But we think that's not the end of the story.