International Trade committee  It's like the earlier question, how do you pick the winners and losers? Who's going to win and who's going to lose? Who's going to be in a position where they're going to be overwhelmed by imports that are going to cause their industry to go into bankruptcy, and who's going to fi

International Trade committee  I think that it's not necessary to have free trade agreements, or to create investor rights in order to do so. I think you can simply have tariff adjustments that will allow you to manage whatever investment you want.

International Trade committee  It depends on the evaluation of each and every project as to exactly what we think is the appropriate measure. Usually we work in terms of small margins—a 5% margin—in order to create an advantage for local industry in regard to our procurement.

International Trade committee  We may not look at any local advantage in regard to larger projects. We work on those generally through the Metro Vancouver government, the regional government. Generally there isn't any local procurement advantage. In fact, this isn't something we typically do in each and ever

International Trade committee  Of course, and that's obviously one of the concerns all governments exercise—who picks the winners and the losers? And we know that—

International Trade committee  That's right. It may very well not be that area. For instance, for providing communications assistance, we may want to give preference to Telus, the biggest company that's in our city. There are 5,000 employers in our city. We may want to be able to look at implementing policie

International Trade committee  Really.

International Trade committee  Do you have a question for me at all?

International Trade committee  Oh, okay. I'll relax.

International Trade committee  Burnaby is a high-tech city. It does a lot of work with the movie industry. We are home to 60% of the movie studio space in British Columbia so that's a big part of the business in our community. Obviously we have major companies that do international work like Electronic Arts C

International Trade committee  We're very aggressive at finding ways to deliver back into our local economies. People can't pay our municipal taxes if they're not taking home a reasonable wage. So in fact we're one of the few cities right across—

International Trade committee  It has certainly been expressed by our council. It has also been expressed at our meetings of the regional government here in the Lower Mainland. There is a concern that public-private partnerships, the effective privatization of infrastructure, will mean that in the future it wi

International Trade committee  For 12 years I've been mayor.

International Trade committee  I think this is true even in a city like ours where we're in the middle of a big metropolitan area—we have about 10% of the population of metro Vancouver—we're focused on improving the economy of our city in relation to the economies even of the cities around us. We're attempting

International Trade committee  As a lawyer myself for some 30 years, I'm well aware of the implications in regard to these agreements, and the requirement that we get legal advice and accounting advice consistently. These agreements have been a big benefit to lawyers. My profession has become wealthy as a resu