International Trade committee  Thank you so much.

International Trade committee  With respect to Korea, we have had not only every opportunity to give our view but tremendous support from Ottawa and the mission on the specific issue we faced, as well as very strong leadership. I would also say, more generally, that as we've grown around the world, I've spent an increasing portion of my time in discussions with our officials in DFAIT, both in Ottawa and out in various missions.

International Trade committee  It's very difficult to put that into any kind of perspective. Suffice it to say that Korea is a large country with a potential market that is large. We've been fortunate to grow our employment by nearly a factor of eight over just the last six or seven years. Most of that employment has occurred in Canada.

International Trade committee  Again, no two countries are quite the same, even if they're at the same levels of size and sophistication. We will certainly go into any country and adapt our product. Our product has already been adapted to the Korean character set. It's literally ready to go, from the standpoint of being useful to Koreans in their language.

International Trade committee  Absolutely. As we went from two countries, Canada and the United States, and then into western Europe and now into 125 countries, our brand has become well known around the world. The utility of the device is well known. Its ease of use is well known, and we have many people who comment, “I'm not great with this kind of stuff, but I can really use this”—and we take that as a high compliment.

International Trade committee  It has all the features of something that would be deliberate, but I don't believe we've ever talked to anybody who said it was deliberate. But, clearly, there is pride in the standard they have. There are forces that believe this is still a good and wonderful thing to do. What their ultimate motives are is not immediately clear.

International Trade committee  If you look into them, those dispute settlement mechanisms are country to country, and they're very lengthy. They would be available, but you're talking about processes that take a great deal of time and energy and would also need to be carefully considered. I'm hopeful that we would have dispute settlement mechanisms that, first of all, would have a very strong informal component, where colleagues across the table from each other could actually discuss things informally.

International Trade committee  Well, BlackBerry has actually been in Asia for about three or four years. My response follows the comment I made to the previous member's question about the technology. We have been actively marketing BlackBerry in countries where the predominant world standard has been done, and our business is building nicely in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, etc.

International Trade committee  I don't believe that is required at this point. Again, what we really have here is a situation in which a good set of principles and good dispute resolution will help. As Shirley-Ann has mentioned, the very process of negotiating brings both light to some of these issues and pressure to bear on the Koreans to be more forthcoming.

International Trade committee  The prohibition now is the application of the regulation regarding the domestic standard, WIPI, which again is a domestic standard unique to Korea.

International Trade committee  Previously, yes, it was. Previously, the Korean overall wireless standard was not widely accessible, but that has changed within the last couple of years.

International Trade committee  It's just under two years, sir. Korea went, again, its own way and advanced what is known as 3G standards, and it's taken a while for the global standard and the Korean standard to converge. That convergence has happened within the last couple of years.

International Trade committee  No, there's no guarantee of that, but we would expect that there would be a mechanism under which unfair treatment or discriminatory treatment of a Canadian company vis-à-vis other countries' companies could be addressed. We believe that, by and large, there is a very strong case within Korea that technologies like BlackBerry should be broadly embraced.

International Trade committee  I guess we would be in the situation we are in today, where the application of Korean policy and regulation is not governed by some kind of mutually negotiated agreement. We would be entirely dependent upon their own interpretation of their laws and regulations. Of course, that is precisely the benefit Shirley-Ann spoke to and I agreed to in the opening comments.

International Trade committee  I have very little to add to what Shirley-Ann has said, but I would say that from the standpoint of balance of trade, I believe we are attempting in any negotiation of this not to immediately redress the balance of trade, but to redress the rules by which an uneven balance of trade has come to pass.