International Trade committee  Yes, that's absolutely right.

International Trade committee  This is your committee. By all means—

International Trade committee  Maybe we can take it sector by sector. Or maybe I could start by taking a step back. There are different things that a trade agreement does for Canadians, and Canadians who are interested in trading, but even in terms of job creation that is a product of Canadian companies and that trade.

International Trade committee  Well, I think it comes back to Prime Minister Abe's economic plan, the plan that he ran on and the plan that he was elected on. He remains a strong leader in Japan. It's sort of commonly known as Abenomics, and it included monetary easing, some fiscal reforms, tax reforms, and opening its markets to trade.

International Trade committee  Thanks very much. I am very happy to be here with you again today. I'm Kirsten Hillman, acting assistant deputy minister, Trade Agreements and Negotiations Branch at Global Affairs Canada. I am Canada's chief negotiator for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. I am here today to provide you with a technical briefing on the TPP Agreement and to answer your questions.

International Trade committee  I am happy to explain that. I think, as a very good example of first mover, we have a very practical example in Canada. First mover advantage is.... Trade agreements are designed to do a few things. They're designed to set out open, predictable, and transparent trading environments for our companies so that they know the conditions under which they're doing business and they can have some security around that.

International Trade committee  No.

International Trade committee  We have many free trade agreements. We have the WTO agreement, which is a global agreement. We have free trade agreements with Chile, Peru, a variety of other countries, and of course, the NAFTA. All of those agreements coexist. The WTO agreement, for example, is an agreement that includes all the TPP countries.

International Trade committee  Okay, sure. There's a variety of ways. We have a number of trade agreements with countries that are structured very differently from us, that have different regulatory regimes, and have different levels of development. Often these areas that we're talking about, labour standards or environmental standards, are related to the level of development, so a free trade agreement seeks to set a standard.

International Trade committee  Not to my knowledge. Not to me. How's that?

International Trade committee  Sure, and we do, in almost all, if not all.... I don't want to say “all”, because I'd have to look at all of our FTAs, but a very common and I think probably universal feature we have in an FTA with an auto manufacturing country is called an “automotive safeguard”. An automotive safeguard is a rule by which if there are import surges that are caused through the implementation of the FTA that damage our domestic industry, we have the power to put our tariff back in place.

International Trade committee  No. We are in the process of consulting, or starting consultations, with companies, with Canadians, with provinces, with others, civil society. That is information we use before we go down a road like that.

International Trade committee  I think the answer to that question is that it's really too soon to answer a question like that, in the sense that every free trade agreement is different and the market access conditions provided in that agreement are different. The market access conditions are both tariff reductions and the rules of origin that apply to that treaty.

International Trade committee  Well, that's a very difficult question for me to answer. I guess my question back to you would be whether you have to choose or whether you can do both. My experience, having done many consultations over the past couple of months, primarily but not exclusively focused on TPP, has been that during the course of those conversations with a variety of different stakeholders—Canadians, provinces, officials, municipal governments, etc.

International Trade committee  Well, for our negotiations branch, softwood lumber is a priority, yes, absolutely, 100%.