International Trade committee  We haven't done the same for the Mercosur countries yet. We do have relationships with a number of the South American trade unions, good relations. I know there are some discussions afoot about trying to pull these organizations together to get a better read bilaterally and multi

International Trade committee  There's a lot of detail to this. I'll give you some high-level pieces and I'll give you an example of what's happening in Brazil right now. One of the core things we have on the books right now that Canada and many other nations have agreed to are core conventions in the Intern

International Trade committee  I can never give a short answer, so I'll do my best. The comment that you made about the cost factor is very interesting and important to explore. I guess I would pose this back. Part of our expanded thinking about trade and why labour conditions, labour standards, and other so

International Trade committee  This is a very good question. On our end, it's something that I think we have a broad handle on, but certainly we're going to be digging more into sector-specific stuff. We're going to have our team looking into this more. The broad concern we would have—and it's following up o

International Trade committee  I'm not sure that what I had said was specifically around market access clarifications, but more broadly speaking, I think it includes that. One of the things that our experience with Canada's approach to trade negotiations...and I think they all sort of fall into this category

International Trade committee  That was a period where I believe the Canadian Labour Congress had submitted views. We don't submit views to every trade agreement going on and we weren't asked to be consulted, aside from the Canada Gazette notice, just to clarify that.

International Trade committee  We would have had input into that, yes.

International Trade committee  I think we as well as others have participated, at this point, in just one broad stakeholders briefing on Mercosur. Essentially, it was an issue around what the timetables could look like and so forth. I have no intel about what the actual proposal is. I can only glean what I'm t

International Trade committee  There are a couple of things in there. To your direct question about what needs to be in any labour chapter of any trade agreement, I think it starts off with a fundamentally different approach from what we've done in the past. I think we're seeing the outcomes of that with respe

International Trade committee  That's right. It's nice to see you again. Thank you.

International Trade committee  Thank you very much. Good morning, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. My name is Angelo DiCaro. I am a national representative and the lead trade policy researcher with Unifor, Canada's largest private sector union. Unifor represents 315,000 workers across Canada in near

International Trade committee  Yes, I'll try to keep it short.

International Trade committee  The focus on this was mostly explaining the impacts on autos, and a lot of the questions we raised in the presentation were about uncertainties that we still are hearing as different analyses are being conducted on various chapters of the deal. For instance, on the media chapter

International Trade committee  Just to supplement that, we followed closely the response of the U.S. special committee on autos that was part of the USTR, and we dug out a memo they had produced after the deal was struck. The auto trade committee called this long-term 25-year to 30-year phase-out a welcome res

International Trade committee  To the point that was made, one thing in addition to what Jerry was saying is the lack of clarity about what was negotiated. Our intelligence on this suggests there's still some discrepancy about the understanding of the terms in that deal and what this will mean about protecting