International Trade committee  As an official, I was part of the group of people who were charged with designing ways and means in which the government could be more open. I learned something from that process. There are two ways in which you consult. One is that you consult in order to improve your technica

International Trade committee  Over the last 10 years, the relationship at the top between our two governments has not been as productive and as reliable as it could have been. There have been many times when I think the government moved in a direction that I thought was unhelpful to building a secure, reliabl

International Trade committee  It's a little difficult to figure out where you want me to start. How far do we need to go? Canada and the United States have a very long history of working together to resolve problems, going back to the 1935 trade agreement, where we first agreed that we would treat each other

International Trade committee  I don't want to get too political--

International Trade committee  Well, you don't do it on the basis of an incremental approach that puts civil servants together to talk about the problems they're experiencing. That does some good, but it really isn't going to change the fundamentals. In order to change the fundamentals, you have to capture ima

International Trade committee  There are quite a number of ways in which you can achieve regulatory convergence, which is a term I like better than harmonization. You can have mutual recognition agreements. You can agree on a certain set of standards and leave it up to the individual country or industry or so

International Trade committee  I was a government civil servant for 22 years, most of that in DFAIT, most of it concentrated on trade negotiations.

International Trade committee  I did all the preparatory work for the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and was part of that team. I advised the NAFTA team, but I had other responsibilities at that time.

International Trade committee  No.

International Trade committee  Statistics Canada did a study a few years ago in which they counted the number of Canadian firms that are engaged in exporting. They counted something like 42,000 of them, about 35,000 of which do trade with the United States. So we have 35,000 companies in Canada--not just large

International Trade committee  I have never been formally consulted. Have I been asked questions? Yes, often. Do I have difficulty gaining access to people working on the issues I'm interested in? No. Is there information available that I need on this initiative? Yes. There is an extensive website available, w

International Trade committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee and share some of my ideas on the security and prosperity initiative. Let me begin by saying I don't represent anybody. As you know, university professors are a rather contrarian group, and