Mr. Rupert Schlegelmilch:

I thank the Deputy for these pertinent questions. I am more than happy to expand on the functioning of the agreement, not least because a meeting of the joint committee was held only a couple of months ago at which we undertook a comprehensive review of how it works. We were able to bring it to the level of the European Commission Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis and the Canadian trade minister, Mary Ng. Some of the granular issues we discussed included quotas for cheese, which are important for us, and the protection of some geographical indications, GIs, including Irish ones we believe Canadians could do a better job of protecting.

More than a dozen committees meet regularly and look at all these granular aspects, giving us a platform to try to implement the letter and spirit of the agreement, and create new opportunities for our operators. This is a machine that functions. It talks about phytosanitary questions and about the administration of some of the quotas. We also have, as I mentioned, regulatory co-operation work, which is very granular. We had a number of meetings of the Regulatory Cooperation Forum, RCF. We had the domestic advisory group that I mentioned where our stakeholders discuss and push, for example, certain issues where they want to see more action. Animal welfare is a typical example. We had long discussions on whether we can improve and we had some successes in influencing Canadian practices in animal transport.

The agreement works. It looks at all aspects of trade and tries to be at the forefront of what modern trade agreements should look at. For example, animal welfare is an issue which we cannot discuss with many partners around the world, because they are just not interested. Here, however, we are setting a signal that we can look at trade issues and the question marks people have in the face of globalisation, to give answers to some of these questions. All of these committees are functioning. We will have a summit with Canada in two weeks where the president of the European Commission and the Canadian president will discuss some of the trade issues. We work bottom-up, from the 12 or 15 committees all the way up to the summit leaders, to make sure that this important part of our external economic policy is functioning well.

On the question of the national parliaments’ oversight, the European Council is involved. We have parliamentary contacts. The question of the multilateral investment court, where Mr. Brown has been negotiating to try to advance this project in the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, UNCITRAL, format. I will leave that to him. The functioning of the agreement is examined in some of the national parliaments. Not only do we have the ratification debates, from time to time, we brief on the state of play on what implementation we are doing.