International Trade committee  No.

International Trade committee  I could take a shot, Madam Chair. I'm not clear what the reference is to, but nevertheless, I think the earlier part of the question is perhaps more pertinent. I would just say that towards the end of negotiations is always difficult. A number of issues that needed to be determ

International Trade committee  I think it was not in our interest to continue with them when they are going to offer—

International Trade committee  I think it's part of the negotiation. What are we going to pay for that? Were we willing to have zero tariffs on all of our Canadian imports in return to compete with Chinese and American companies who had 0% in the U.K market?

International Trade committee  When we re-engaged with the United Kingdom in August…. After the minister spoke, I think it was, we had the timeline square in our view and we were negotiating toward that.

International Trade committee  We clearly had December 31 in our sight.

International Trade committee  I was going to say that the transitional agreement and the continuity agreement are one and the same. We are talking about the same thing.

International Trade committee  On the market access differences, the key areas of difference would be in the tariff rate quotas. We negotiated amounts for the EU. The EU had 28 members at the time. We would not expect that we would get that amount of a TRQ in one single country. Then it really comes down to

International Trade committee  That was just for this. In fact, when we were negotiating CETA, the United Kingdom per se was not at the table. It was an EU member state at that point, and the EU itself does its international trade negotiations for the member states.

International Trade committee  We certainly had that discussion with them at the negotiating table, around what zero tariffs would look like. One of the challenges, when they released the MFN tariff and announced that they would make it MFN tariff-free is that they would do that for everybody. Now you're giv

International Trade committee  It's fair to say that we've always been high on their priority list. How high were we? I am not sure.

International Trade committee  I don't think so. We weren't the only ones that saw what they were doing.

International Trade committee  I don't think so. Having sat across from the U.K. for the last two years, I think they are getting more and more experienced. I think that will certainly help our bilateral negotiations once we get them launched. No, I'm not that worried about his remarks about bandwidth. No.

International Trade committee  We will get our mandate from cabinet. I presume we'll get one, as I said, in the latter half of next year. That will provide us with the scope as negotiators to get a deal in place. If there are issues that come up during the negotiations that are outside of our mandate or that

International Trade committee  We would have to wait, yes, for a mandate from cabinet before we launched those negotiations. Absolutely, yes.