International Trade committee  I do think that a trade and investment agreement will facilitate and help trade between the countries. The distance won't go away, but that's one of the barriers—the tariffs and the investment. Walmart was just mentioned. India doesn't want big box stores in their country right n

International Trade committee  I don't know exactly. I don't have a good answer for that question. A good example is what we just heard from the pork side—that there is potential. That's an industry that I wouldn't have thought was going to benefit from this, but he was talking about market access, and not onl

International Trade committee  Part of it is this: who should we sign agreements with? I'm an economist, so I believe there are resource constraints. And there must be some resource constraints in negotiating agreements, so how do we decide which countries to sign agreements with? I read in the newspaper a c

International Trade committee  If you look at the evidence of impacts of agreements—not specifically the India agreement because I haven't studied that one specifically—if you look at the vast literature of the impact of liberalizing trade, often it does shift employment from some firms to other firms. Typical

International Trade committee  It's probably important to separate short-run effects from long-run effects. We have already talked about how this agreement doesn't represent a lot of trade, but it does represent potential. There is potential for growth. In the longer run, it's probably going to increase produc

International Trade committee  I'm not sure what your points about inequality or employment were.

International Trade committee  Again, part of my early comment was not to oversell the trade agreement. Saying that trade agreements either increase inequality or significantly diminish it is probably not the right way to look at a trade agreement. There is very little evidence that inequality is going to be a

International Trade committee  Again, I was pretty clear that there is potential. There is huge potential, and I think businesses are discovering that. This is the reason we're trying to foster stronger relations. Let me be clear. In both the communiqué I wrote and in my comments today, I fully support going

International Trade committee  Well, I'm not going to comment on the direction of the cost of energy, but definitely the impact of distance relates not only to how much it costs to get goods to market, but also to networks and relationships. Communication and transportation costs have come down. Whatever hap

International Trade committee  Yes, I still stand by that. Again, the distance and economic size is a very important driver of trade relations. Why do we trade so much with the U.S.? We like them and everything, but they're very close and they're very big, so it's just a natural. India is trading with China a

International Trade committee  Oh, right. So they have different interests. We've heard again today that we want market access, not just in goods but in services and other industries. If you look at the most recent WTO report on India's trade policies, even though they talk about being liberal and liberalizi

International Trade committee  No, I have not done any myself. I looked at the Canada-India joint committee report. That's the only document I've seen. I haven't seen an economic analysis of this.

International Trade committee  When I read that document there were some numbers in terms of goals or objectives, like doubling trade and things like that. If you look at the data without an agreement, we have been doubling trade and we've increased trade a lot. It's hard to argue that the agreement itself i

International Trade committee  I think it's largely in a positive way. One of the challenges was just in getting noticed. India has a lot of interests. Canada is not high on the agenda. We are very much in the press in India, and I think a lot of their government officials really took note of.... One of their

International Trade committee  Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me. I am an economist, and I am with the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary. I think you just said the CEPA “with China”, but I think you meant India. I hope you did, because that's what I