Thank you very much to the chair and the committee for the chance to be here.

As we've been talking about this afternoon, we're still two years away from a mandatory six-year review of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico agreement, but I think it's a good thing for this committee to be thinking about it and preparing for that process right now.

The federal government and some business associations appear to believe that Canada should seek a smooth rollover of CUSMA rather than risk another potentially messy renegotiation. This is part of the team Canada strategy that we're seeing right now with trips to the United States.

I think a smooth rollover is probably wishful thinking for two reasons. The first is that, no matter who's in office in Washington in 2026, there will be political and industry pressure on the U.S. administration to adjust CUSMA's rules in areas such as dairy market access, energy, agriculture and food policy, automotive rules of origin and, possibly, digital trade. Canada is facing considerable U.S. pressure to drop its Online News Act and its digital service tax, for example, and we know there's a target on supply management.

The second reason a smooth CUSMA review is unlikely is that it was never the intention of the Trump administration when they negotiated the deal, and it's something that I think the current administration agrees with. If we look at Katherine Tai's comments last month, she said the whole point of the review is to maintain a certain level of discomfort, and she meant that for Canada and Mexico, so I think we should just be expecting that we're going to go into something much bigger than what would be a rollover.

A simple reapproval of CUSMA may also be a lost opportunity, given shifts in thinking about trade policy even since we renegotiated a few years ago. All three North American governments acknowledged the unequal benefits of trade for women, racialized workers and indigenous peoples, for example, as well as trade's contribution to biodiversity loss and climate change. The geopolitics of trade, the importance of subsidies and industrial policy have also shifted since we renegotiated CUSMA. For example, does CUSMA help or hinder our efforts to bolster North American manufacturing and supply chain resiliency? There are questions around the rules of origin. I think these are bound to come up, as we talked about in the last session.

The six-year review of CUSMA, while not without significant risks to Canada and Mexico, at least forces us to rethink whether the treaty is delivering substantive, widely shared benefits. We think Canada should seize the moment rather than ducking and weaving. By that, I mean Canada should prepare for the review as if a partial renegotiation were inevitable, whether or not there's a Democrat or a Republican in the White House.

This morning the CCPA published a collaborative report that assesses how CUSMA is operating to date and suggests ways to build on the environmental, inclusive, trade and worker centred novelties in the agreement that built on the original NAFTA. The authors make 25 recommendations for fixing NAFTA's labour provisions, including the innovative rapid response labour mechanism, closing gaps in the rules of origin in the auto sector as well as improving enforcement of the environmental chapter, which is not much improved upon from the original NAFTA, from our perspective.

Other aspects of the agreement can be made more inclusive and worker-focused in the right circumstances. For example, the digital trade chapter is completely out of date with current U.S. thinking on the need to better regulate emerging artificial intelligence; the need to protect people, especially children, from harmful algorithms and workplace surveillance technologies; and the need to crack down on monopolies in the tech sector. CUSMA's cross-border data flow provisions and its prohibition on data localization should be reviewed.

The three CUSMA parties should also find the courage to completely dismantle the vestiges of investor-state dispute settlement between Mexico and the United States. The ISDS regime is incompatible with the achievement of human rights, including indigenous peoples' rights, and the protection of biodiversity. Leaving it intact, even in a limited form, creates unacceptable risks for Mexico and, I think, an unacceptable power imbalance in what should be a more equal North American relationship.

Progress in any of these areas will depend on the political configuration of the continent in the lead-up to the review. Still, Canada would be wise to come to the table with a solid list of proposals as leverage in a potentially stressful negotiation. I just conclude by saying that any review should contain ample opportunities for consultation with civil society stakeholders in the three countries and should not be left up exclusively to trade negotiators or corporate lobbyists.