International Trade committee  One thing I would say about the sorts of headline statistics is that there will be a lot of SMEs that, for capacity reasons, will not be able to export because it takes a fair amount of bandwidth internally. Not every SME today is also ready to export today, but maybe tomorrow th

International Trade committee  In terms of the macroeconomic downside to the Canadian economy, it is much more weighted toward those who export goods as opposed to those who are exporting services. If we are in a world where an agreement has been finalized before December 31 but has not yet gone through the pa

International Trade committee  The international trade picture for Canadian companies has absolutely settled down since March. There are still industries that are not doing as well as they should. If you're exporting a service, that is quite difficult to do at the moment, particularly because of travel restric

International Trade committee  We don't have a coherent industrial plan. Really, what our industrial policy in this country has been is actually the summation of a patchwork of policies at the federal, provincial and municipal level. Ultimately, what you do in an FTA reflects your domestic industrial policy.

International Trade committee  How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? I'm not saying this to be flippant. I genuinely don't know. I'm not in the room. As a very matter-of-fact observation, we have to finish the discussions, introduce implementing legislation, pass the legislation and then operationa

International Trade committee  As I alluded to in my opening remarks, there was a study done by a Canadian economist, Dan Ciuriak, looking at the impact in a Canada-U.K. context of the U.K.'s ratification of CETA. There are some health warnings that I had mentioned about why it's not an apples-to-apples comp

International Trade committee  Yes. When you're looking at how companies might decide to structure their business, investment and exports can go hand in hand. Certainly, what you might see in a U.K.-Canada context will actually be compounded by the U.K.'s divorce from the EU where Canadian companies have set u

International Trade committee  There are none that I would be able to talk about in a public forum like this.

International Trade committee  Do you mean in the context of the U.K. or with the EU and CETA?

International Trade committee  The work the trade commissioner service has been doing, I think, has largely been around informing companies of what is happening in Brexit and making sure they're able to start to take measures to mitigate their risk. I appreciate that there are difficulties in terms of being ab

International Trade committee  What prompted us to write the letter was simply that December 31 is rapidly approaching. We have a domestic legislative process that needs to follow the conclusion of any deal, and time is running short now. It was running short then when we wrote the letter. Certainly, if you're

International Trade committee  In juxtaposition to what you might see under, say, Canada's negotiation with ASEAN where there was a formal Gazette notice, to my knowledge there has not been any formal Gazette notice for the U.K. process. I will say that both the minister's office and the departmental officials

International Trade committee  I think that any time you're in a negotiation, there's going to be a lot of heated rhetoric. I still remember what someone said to me about CETA, about how when you get to the end, there's drama both real and manufactured. Whether this is real or manufactured, that's not for me t

International Trade committee  As I understand it, the non-tariff barriers have been discussed so far at an EU level, given that the U.K. hasn't fully divorced itself from the EU rule book. It will, as I understand it, copy over the EU rule book on January 1. What we're hoping to see is that we'll be able to p

International Trade committee  As a multisectoral association, I appreciate my members' concerns equally across all industries, so I wouldn't want to start singling out particular ones. I think the ones that I had noted in my remarks around lobster, vehicles, beef, plastics.... Those are the ones that have cer