 Cast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today's webinar on free trade agreements and how they can benefit your community. My name is Jessica Ritchie. I'm from the Regional Programs and Engagement Branch of the Ministry of Jobs, Trade, and Technology, and I'll be moderating today's question-and-answer period as well as providing technical support throughout the webinar. I'm located in Victoria, British Columbia on the unceded Coast Salish territory of the Lekwangan people, known today as the Swimal and Songhees First Nation. I'm going to spend the next couple of minutes introducing the webinar platform to you in case you haven't used it before, and then I'll introduce our speakers and we'll move right into the content for today's webinar. If you haven't used GoToWebinar before, there's a couple of things that you'll benefit from knowing. If you have any questions, you'll see that there is a question panel on the question box on the control panel. You'll have to open it up by just hitting that triangle, and please do ask any questions that you have for our presenters throughout the presentation. We'll be having a question-and-answer period at the end of the session, but don't wait until the end of the session because you might forget, so pop them in there and I'll have lots of questions to ask our panelists at the end of the session. If you are having any challenges with the audio, you can also use your phone to call in if you're having connection issues. Just click on the phone call button and a phone number will pop up with a pin and you'll be able to access the audio that way. The other thing that you can do is you can raise your hand. Raising your hand just lets me know you have a question or concern and I can reach out to you directly. A quick reminder, today's session is going to be recorded, so if you know anyone who would benefit from the information that's being shared today or if you want to go back and review what you've seen, you'll be able to find it on the Economic Development website. You can look under the BC Ideas Exchange past webinar section and you'll be able to see all the information there. So that's all of the administrative stuff out of the way. I'm going to hand this over to my colleagues at the International Trade Division of the Ministry of Jobs, Trade, and Technology. We're joined with Ben Kaliznik, Chelsea Lusani, and Hagan Sami. Great. Thanks, Jessica. Hi, everyone. I'm just starting my webcam here. So my name is Ben Kaliznik, as Jessica said, and I work in the Trade Policy and Negotiations Branch in the BC Ministry of Jobs, Trade, and Technology. Chelsea, Hagan, and I are going to be sharing the presenting duties today, so we'll sort of go back and forth between us. Now, the branch that Chelsea and I work for represents BC's interest in pre-trade agreement negotiations, trade disputes affecting BC, and we also work to increase businesses' awareness of the opportunities that can be found in pre-trade agreements. So thanks for being here today and to come and hear about how trade agreements can benefit your community. If I'm speaking too fast or you're having trouble hearing us, please just send a note to Jessica and I'm sure she'll let us know. Today we plan to cover quite a bit. We're going to go quickly over what our ministry is all about and what pre-trade agreements do. As well as Canada's pre-trade agreement landscape. And then we're going to go into the opportunities that most pre-trade agreements have in common for the goods sectors, services sectors, investments, and for government procurement in particular. We also hope to walk you through some practical tools, things like Canada's Terra Finder. And then I think, again, we'll talk later about some other provincial resources that are available. Some of this is a little bit dense and technical, and the good thing is that there are time for questions. But hopefully the one thing, if you can take away one thing, it's that you know that you can contact us after this webinar is over. And, you know, we're always here to answer any questions or address any concerns. And if we can't, then we definitely know who to put you in touch with, whether that's the federal government or whoever it might be. So I think we're going to start with the first poll question. And Jessica, just put that up on the screen there. And the question is, what percentage of VC goods exports go to the West? That's great. I can see a lot of people have responded. So I'm just going to close the poll and I'll show the results. So it looks like 72 percent was clearly the favorite. And the correct answer is 49 percent. Sorry, I thought we were going to show that up on the screen. Okay. So the correct answer is 49 percent. So moving into the ministry, we really aiming to make life more affordable for British Columbians by building a strong, sustainable, innovative economy that works for everyone. There are many ways to foster this economic growth. One, just one of those is to encourage businesses to leverage the opportunities that can be found in free trade agreements. Through those agreements, VC goods and services can become more competitive. We can revitalize traditional industries and establish new ones. We can foster trade diversification, which is very important in today's trade climate. And we can also create jobs. The problem is free trade agreements are very long and complex and technical. And it's unreasonable to expect that most small and medium sized enterprises would have the resources and the time to really navigate the web of FTAs, let alone the complex details of just one of those free trade agreements. You know, big businesses might have those tools, but small and medium sized businesses are really sure busy creating jobs and growing their businesses. And so through our FTA outreach and education initiative, our goal is to really focus on underrepresented export groups and SMEs to ensure that the economic benefits of those free trade agreements are widespread and understood throughout the problem. And now I think we're going to have another full question. So which of these is normally covered in a free trade agreement? Great. It looks like everyone got the right answer on that one. That's terrific. So you probably heard, you mentioned some of these before, but definitely Chelsea is going to go into just more details later to let you know how they are in all of those agreements. So moving on to what free trade agreements actually do. The first thing that they do is build on WTO access. I'm sure most of you have heard of the World Trade Organization. This is the foundation of global trade. It really sets the rules of trade between nations. There are 164 member countries through the WTO members set their base tariff rates. Those are duties on the products that come into their country. And so they set those with all other countries. But they also sign on to other aspects of trade, rules around other aspects of trade like government procurement, for example. The other thing that members do through the WTO is settle trade disputes. And FTAs build on the commitments made at the WTO. And one way they do that is by members sort of offer better or preferential treatment, especially on tariff rates to a bilateral free trade agreement partner. So that goes beyond the WTO access that they provided. Free trade agreements typically cover goods, services, investments, government procurement, intellectual property, environment, labor and inclusive trade. And some of these are a little more common in more modern FTAs. Some of Canada's earlier free trade agreements were not as ambitious as some of the ones that are being negotiated now. They were really only sort of focused on goods. And so now as we have modernized the free trade agreement process, they have come to include things like inclusive trade. Inclusive trade in particular is really trying to ensure that the benefits of free trade agreements are felt by widely felt. So by women, by SMEs, by indigenous people. And that is fairly new. It is something that is working to the comprehensive and progressive agreement for trans-specific partnerships, the CPTPP. It is also something that is found in the renegotiated Prisma. But the point is, as we have gone on, they have sort of become more, the net has been thrown wider and include more aspects of daily business activities. And so they are getting more and more complex. But what do free trade agreements really do? How do they make trade easier? And how do they facilitate that business and in some cases reduce the cost of doing business? The first is tariff reduction. This is sort of the most tangible aspect of free trade agreements. You know, they reduce the cost of and make VC products more competitive. If someone told you that your blueberries could be 15% cheaper going into Vietnam to the CPTPP and also 15% cheaper than competitors that don't have that preferential access, that's a pretty compelling, that's compelling. Tariff reduction also reduces the cost of imports into Canada. And so we talk a lot about exports and that's great. But, you know, bringing something in, such as shrimp from Vietnam, and then putting that into a processed food product for re-exports, that can also save you money by reducing your tariff. As for non-tariff barriers, these are the technical requirements and differing standards and certification procedures, labeling requirements, all those sort of things related to human and animal and plant health. These are, of course, these are important. But if you're being told that you need to do the same certification procedures or you're duplicating things and it's, you know, it's adding to your costs, that can be very frustrating, of course. And so the good thing is most STAs contain committees designed to identify these and address these and hopefully reduce that duplication. The next is rules of origin. These are, these can be very complicated and are sometimes product specific. STAs spell the ways out in which you can source a product from STA partners and still gain preferential treatment for that good. So if that good is coming from Canada and it's a raw material and it's, you know, it's clearly demonstrated that it's from Canada, that's probably not going to be a problem. But if it is a manufactured good or something that has parts and pieces from other countries as well outside of the STA partners, then sometimes you need to make that calculation to figure out whether it makes, makes the cut as far as getting that preferential tariff or preferential treatment. So STAs try to be as clear as possible in how that is done and how that is calculated. The reality is some of them are better than others at doing that. The good thing is you, if you're, if you're unsure if a business is unsure, you can apply through the Canada Border Services Agency for an advanced ruling or you may be able to apply for something similar to the export country. It just depends on the agreement in question. The next is facilitated business entry. This really makes it easier for a business person to enter STA markets, whether they're an investor or an introvert transfer. And, and so a business may also find them useful for bringing them in. They are reciprocal provisions. So you may need someone that has a, you know, technical expertise in fixing the machinery that you've imported from Europe, for example, that you just cannot find in Canada. And so that may, an agreement may allow you to bring someone in to do that more easily. Government procurement, as you all know well, governments buy goods and services a lot. And our STAs aim to ensure that that process is transparent and impartial and accountable and accessible by all. And again, some STAs are a little better than others at doing this, but the CPTPP in particular really aims to speak to SMEs and try to make it as clear as possible for small and medium-sized businesses to access some of those opportunities. The most important thing you need to know is that the access to government procurement markets to vary by country and by agreement and must be above set threshold. Finally, transparency and predictability and recourse for disputes. STAs, the idea is really that we have agreed upon rules with our free trade agreement partner and we have dispute resolution to enforce those. So that really gives it the teeth and we know that we can hold our free trade agreement partners accountable to the things that they find out for. So here we have a map showing Canada's free trade agreements network. And as you probably know, Canada and BC have historically sent a majority of our goods and services to the United States. And this makes a lot of sense. BC produces a lot of things that the US wants. NASA has provided preferential access to that US market for decades now. And they're right next door. It's a lot easier in some cases to transport our goods to the United States than it is to other countries. And while the US remains our largest trading partner over the last decade or so, BC has started to reduce its reliance on the US market and we are trading more now with Asia and other markets. If businesses are looking to diversify, the good news is that Canada has been very busy on the free trade agreement front and that preferential access for Canadian goods and services is growing. So we have talked about NASA and its renegotiated Canada-US-Mexico agreement, which as you probably know is signed but not yet ratified. Whether it's that or CEDA or CCFPA, we now have 14 free trade agreements covering 51 countries. And as you can see from the map, BC is uniquely positioned geographically to take advantage of that network. The other piece of good news is that these free trade agreements do not cancel each other up. So Canada has a free trade agreement with Mexico through NASA and we also have one with Mexico through the CPTPP. And businesses can pick and choose which aspects of those agreements they want to utilize. Now you might be wondering about the role of the provincial government in free trade agreements. It's true that the federal government is the one that negotiates and enters into those agreements. But Canada consults stakeholders and the provinces and territories extensively in the lead-up to those negotiations and as those negotiations are happening. And that really ensures that those local and regional interests and provincial and territorial government interests are all being represented as those negotiations are happening. And once those agreements are enforced, provincial governments and sometimes local governments as well are often subject to some of those agreements. And government procurement is a perfect example of that. Once those agreements are enforced, a lot of the work that we do in the trade policy negotiations branch is to ensure that provincial policies and regulations are consistent with our trade obligations. Because when they aren't, this can result in a dispute and which can be very costly and time consuming and just not a very good experience. That's all of that said, countries and governments don't trade, businesses trade. And so that is part of the purpose of our outreach initiative is to try to broadcast some of the opportunities that businesses may not be aware of. Of course, it's up to businesses to take that step to actually to make those trade connections. And now I think we're going to pause for a couple of more polls. So this question is, which of these countries does Canada have free trade agreements with? Oh, okay. So very, quite a very response there. And the answer is actually Israel. So the Canada Israel agreement has been around for a while with recently modernized. And so we definitely don't have an agreement with China or Laos at this point. And all right. Okay, so here is the next question. Which jurisdictions are in the Canadian free trade agreement? The CFPA. Chelsea is going to talk about this a little bit later. And this is one of our domestic trade agreements. Okay, great. I'll just close this last one for you as well. Oh, good. Okay. Well, so the correct answer was all provinces, territories and the federal government. So well done. Okay, we're going to turn now to some specific trade agreements. So the first one is the Canada Korea Free Trade Agreement, the CFPA. This entered into force on January 1st, 2015. And it was Canada's first FDA in the Asia Pacific. Before that, BC companies were at a bit of a disadvantage in Korea, in particular, because EU and the US already had deals there. And so it was a big step. And studies have shown that the deal may increase goods exports from BC and Canada to South Korea by as much as 32%. Now it's been in force for four years or so now. We have seen some evidence of increases in some sectors for products and agri-food and seafood. It is waxing and waning, but that does seem to be some benefits that are being felt there. BC does have a geographical advantage in accessing Korea, but we also have strong business and cultural ties with Korea. And I think Chelsea will probably give us some more examples a little bit later on related to the CFPA. Turning next to the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. You'll find that most of these are quite a mouthful, but that is either for short. The EU is a market of approximately 500 million consumers. And this agreement has been provisionally enforced since September 2017. What this means is that most of the agreement, about 95% of it is in effect. The remaining parts need to be ratified by each EU member state. And this is just because of how the EU divides its jurisdiction on international trade. The CEDA is a very ambitious agreement. The tariff elimination on day one was 98%. So as of day one of the agreement, 98% of all tariffs were gone. And once it's fully implemented, up to 99% of tariffs will be at zero. So that's great. Canada is the only G7 country with preferential access to the world's two largest economies. That's the EU and the US. And in fact, we're the only country for now at least with preferential access to all of the G7 countries. As we all know, the UK is also a G7 country, but also a member of the EU. Our trade agreement with the UK is through the EU. And so if and when the UK leaves the EU, we would of course no longer have a trade agreement with the UK until Canada negotiates another one with the UK. So we all know that there's a lot of uncertainty around Brexit. And you may get questions from the businesses that you deal with about that. You know, people who are already exporting to the UK or may be interested in doing that. If there are questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us or connect them with us and we'd be happy to talk to them. And now I am going to turn it over to Chelsea. Great. Thank you, Ben. So the third agreement we'd like to highlight is the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement with the UK. Many of you may recall that this used to be called the TPP, the Transipotic Partnership, and the United States was a member of this original agreement. Now, as you recall, the US actually withdrew from this agreement last year and the remaining 11 members of the agreement. And you'll see the second bullet lists the current members. These people, they continued with the agreement and kept going with the agreement after the US withdrew. So this agreement is Canada's most recently implemented trade agreement. It will cover 500 million people when the agreement is fully in effect and up to 13.5% of gold in GDP. There are also future members, like other countries, that are lining up to join the agreement. Now, at the moment, the agreement is currently in effect for seven out of the 11 members of the TPP. So Canada, Australia, Japan, and Mexico, New Zealand, and Singapore as of December 30th, 2018 brought the agreement into effect and Vietnam brought into effect as of January 14th of this year. Now, the remaining four countries, so Brunei, Chile, Peru, and Malaysia, they are working on redefining the agreement and once it comes in effect for everybody, it will be 500 million people. Now, an interesting fact about the TPP is that BC is actually expected to benefit more under this agreement than under the original Transipotic Partnership. And the reason for this is that, you know, BC companies that sell similar goods and services as American companies, for example, is not competing with American companies in these jurisdictions. So we have a preferential advantage. We have a sort of competitive edge in these countries where the tariffs have started coming down for us, but they have not done the same for the American company. Now, this is sort of a time-limited opportunity. We know the US is interested in entering into free trade agreements in several countries. So we may not have this competitive advantage forever. So we usually urge companies, you know, if they're interested in these markets, you know, start looking into it and potentially get in there before the Eric gets to do, and we'll have first mover advantage. We know the US is already in discussions with several countries. So the next agreement I'd like to highlight is the Canadian Free Trade Agreement. This is one of our domestic trade agreements. So as you all correctly noted, it includes the federal government, all provinces and territories, and the process for reconciling various regulations that can be a necessary area to trade. Another feature of this agreement is that it has enforceable disabilities that will be a mechanism. So how this works is that if a jurisdiction isn't living up to our commitments, to the commitments we made, or if they're treating a visa jurisdiction unfairly, we do have a mechanism for resolving that dispute. Another domestic trade agreement we have is the US Partnership Trade Agreement. So this is the NWPT order to have four provincial provinces in it, BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Meditoba. You may recall, it used to be called the TILMA when there was just BC and Alberta. And then we have Saskatchewan joined recently, and then Meditoba joined recently as well. So now it has four provinces in it. There are other provinces that have expressed an interest. You may have seen articles about Ontario expressing an interest in joining this new West Partis Trade Agreement. So how this agreement differs from the CFTA is that, well, first of all, it's filled on what we've agreed across the country, but it's also a more ambitious agreement. So within our regional free trade agreement area of four provinces, we actually have better access to each other than the other provinces due to these four provinces. Similar to our other agreements, there are streamlined dispute settlements. So if any of them is not living up to their commitments, we can take them to TAS. And it also has something called a business agreement. So if a business wants to register their business here and wants to do business in other provinces, it may do so if it just has to register once. You pay in one province, and you just pick a box for the other provinces you want to do business in. So really, like, you know, a very concrete way of making things cheaper and more comprehensive and just more efficient for companies. So before we go on to the next section, we just want to do a quick, full question about the sort of gauge, sort of the, I guess, the speed of how things are going. So let us know, you know, if we're going at a good taste, choose slow too fast, like we'd like to hear your thoughts and adjust accordingly. Thank you. That's great to know. So we will continue as we have been. Thank you for the feedback. So as Ben alluded to earlier in the presentation, we want to talk about the opportunities in common that these trade agreements have for companies and businesses in the community. So we first want to focus on the good sector. So again, anything you can go from your toes. We've highlighted three agreements. So the first one is the Korea Agreement. The second one is the European Union Agreement. And the third one is the CPTPP, the one with the Asia Pacific with 11 countries in it. So if you look at the first row, you will see that the overall tariff elimination for these three agreements is quite ambitious. So the Korea Agreement, right now, 95% of tariffs on Canadian goods are 0% tariffs. So there are no duties on 95% of Canadian goods. Under the European Union Agreement, 98% of tariffs are now 0%. When this agreement is spilling effect, this will increase to 99%. Under the CPTPP, once it's spilling effect, this will increase to 99% of tariffs coming 0% as well. So quite a significant competitive advantage. Now, a quick note on this preferential tariff treatment. Companies need to claim these tariff treatments, like these are not automatically applied at the border. If a company doesn't know that they are able to be eligible under one of these, they will not have that cost-saving application. So just remind companies that they need to apply for this. All right. So I pulled out a couple of sectors to give you an example of what the tariff treatment will be for companies here in BC. So for example, you'll see agriculture and agri-food under the Korea Agreement. Over 97% of Canadian goods, it will be 0% tariff on spilling effect. If you look at fish and seafood under the CPTPP, so the last column, once spilling effect, 100% of Canadian goods in fish and seafood will have 0% duties once agreement of spilling effect. So this is quite significant. A couple of other examples. I pulled out what the tariffs are for a technology factor. And one comment on digital products. So if a company has a digital product that is transmitted electronically over the internet, there will be no duties, no tariffs on those products. So continuing on for the goods sector. So Ben mentioned earlier, non-tariff area reduction and or elimination. So these are things like the duplicate testing, duplicate certification, where it may not be needed. Another opportunity is improved rules of origin. So building on what you said, this is a reflection of how the modern economy works. It's very rare for one product to be built with 100% components from one country. So if your product has enough domestic content and there are threshold sets in the agreements for different products, your product may still have enough domestic content to be considered Canadian enough that you can send it to the other market and it will be treated as a Canadian product and eligible for a preferential tariff rate. There is increased transparency and predictability for the goods sector, and this is because the rules are spelled out. You know how your product is going to be treated and you know if it's not treated the way it should be, that you have recourse to it through these settlements. And finally, I just want to make a comment on exceptions. The agreements do try and cover as much as possible of the economy, but governments on both sides are negotiating. They do sometimes take a small list of exceptions. So, and these are things that they inside will not be covered by the agreement. So it's important for a company to check to see if their product is first of all covered under the agreement and if there is an exception or not. This is also something that we can assist with. So moving on to services. So just to give you an example, you know, if a good, if it was something like a piece of machinery, that would fall under the goods sector and the opportunities for the goods sector. But if you are supplying a service, service that machinery to repair it or to provide training, then this will fall under the services opportunities of trade agreements. So right off the bat, again, because the rules are spelled out, you know how your service will be treated. You know, for example, that the other country, that they can't start doing things, for example, like saying only 30 hairdressers will be allowed in this jurisdiction at any one time, but they can't suddenly bring in a service like that. And there are several other commitments that are very similar to that, but it's meant to provide, you know, that service team that's available and just increase if not the market act if possible. So really, if they do make efforts to level the playing field to ensure that, you know, your service supplier isn't being treated worse than a service supplier from that domestic market. And again, once promised an exception, there are a small list of exceptions. So it's important to see if your service falls under one of these. And finally, I have a table here to show a little bit about how the three agreements have talked about, the Korean agreement, the EU agreement, and the CPTP, how they treat services. So the first row is something called positive list versus negative list. And you'll note that all three agreements use something called the negative list. So what this means is that everything is included unless there's a specific exception that's taken against it. So if you read the services chapters and if you see that there's no exception for your service, that means that it is in. So the one of the benefits of using a negative list is that it makes it very easy to figure out if something is in or not. Under older agreements, people tend to use the positive list. So then you would actually have to see if there's a list of services included and then you'll see if you're in or not. So a negative list is something that's a lot clearer for businesses. So this is how agreements are tending to go now in this direction. Another key opportunity for services sectors is the facilitated business entry that was mentioned earlier. So how this works is that for certain categories of professionals, business people or investors, they are able to have facilitated entry into our FTA partner countries for a temporary amount of time. So this allows, for example, a service supplier to go into another market to provide training around services selling. It allows an investor to go in and do some research. It allows them to go service their investment. So really understanding that, you know, it's not just about sending goods and services over that there's also like a people element to international trade. So moving on to investment, another one thing that these agreements try and do for investment is really provide as much stability and transparency as they can for investors, you know, recognizing that these are very important things when you're making an investment. And one way to do this is, again, by spelling out the rules by ensuring there's improved market access. For example, in various investment chapters in agreements, there are different protections and different things called, for example, minimum standard of treatment. So you know how your investment and how you as an investor are going to treat it when you go into the other market. So typically it's like, you know, no worse than the others. There are protections, for example, rules on expropriation and compensation, so again, giving you that stability and knowing how you're going to be treated. And as well, investors can benefit from facilitated business entry, so that's what we're going to do on this previous slide. Similar to the others, there are some exceptions that governments do take, so it is important to see if, if the investment that you're trying to make, if it's about the sort of threshold or if it's going to be caught in one of these exceptions. And again, something that we can't assist with. So the final area of the economy that we want to cover today is government procurement. So as you know, governments apply things, you know, by goods, services and construction. And what these agreements try and do is they don't have foreign government contracts in another jurisdiction, so suddenly you don't just have access to, you know, government procurement here in DC, you have access to government procurement across the country, here in Canada, access to government procurement in the US, in the EU, in Korea, in some of these Asian specific countries. So really just trying to broaden what is available to people and just give them more opportunity. So right off the bat, you have improved market access because before, without these agreements, they weren't actually as good as they were on those contracts because the rules are spelled out so much of the other sectors, they have greater certainty and stability so you know how you treat it. And it's very important to keep in mind when you're looking at government procurement is something called coverage and threshold. So with coverage, governments decide what parts of the which parts of government are going to be covered. So for example, they may decide to only have it as a national level government. They may include provincial level government levels of government. Within those levels of coverage, they may also decide that only these 10 ministries or 10 departments are covered. They may decide that crime corporations, for example, are not covered or they are covered. So it is important to figure out for each of the agreements for the market that the company is interested in, whether or not that department or that level of government is covered. Now, the second thing to keep in mind is that there are these things called thresholds. So for a contract to be eligible for a company to bid on, it has to be above a certain threshold. So above that threshold, that contract is available for a foreign company or a company from DC to bid on. So on the next slide, I'm going to show you some of the coverage and thresholds we have here in Canada. So if you look at this table here, this covers five agreements. So the first one is the newest partnership trade agreement. The second one is the CFTA, so the Canadian Free Trade Agreement. Third is the CETA, the European Union Trade Agreement. GPA, that's what the WTO, and finally the CPTPP. So if you look at each of these agreements here, these columns here show the coverage. So under all the agreements, you'll see that ministries and departments at the provincial level are covered. If you go on to crime corporations, you'll see that only the first three agreements, the newest partnership and the CFTA, the two domestic agreements and the European Union Agreement, they cover crime corporations. You'll see that as the WTO and under the Asian Agreement, crime corporations are not covered. Under the match factor, so local government, you'll see that only the first three agreements cover local government. So what these numbers mean is that if the contract is worth above these numbers, so 10,000 into the newest partnership trade agreement, over $649,000 under the Asian Pacific Agreement, if the contract is worth over those amounts, then a foreign company can bid on it. So these are our thresholds here in DC, and then the other countries that we've negotiated with, they will have thresholds as well that may be similar to these. So it's important for the company to look and see, first of all, note, if the level of government they're interested covered, what exactly is covered, what ministries with departments, crime corporations, local government, and then finally, what is the threshold? So just a quick note, these thresholds for three of these agreements, they're adjusted every two years. So the numbers do change every two years. We're working on another update and we'll share that to when it's available. These thresholds should be available online as well. So moving on, I'd want to pass it over to Ben, and he's going to show you one of the practical tools that he was mentioning. So this is how to look up tariff rates. I'm going to switch my screen in one second. Great, thanks, Chelsea. So before we pass it over to Ben, I just want to quickly walk you through a practical tool called Canada's tariff finder. I'll do this very quickly. So then have some time to speak. And this is something that you might consider sharing with any of the businesses that you speak with. It's going to try to do a live demonstration right now. It's very user friendly. It's to begin all you really need to know is whether you're exporting or importing the country that you're dealing with and then the product. So let's try an exporting example. And let's input Japan. And you'll see from the list that this only includes countries that we have FTAs with. So there are ways to find the rates, the tariff rates for countries that we don't have FTAs with. It's just a little bit more difficult to do. If you can't do that, please just let me know and I can certainly help with that. And and then the next thing you need to know is your product. And there are two ways to do this. You can either just describe the product and the system will try to locate it for you. Or you can put in the harmonized system code with the HS code. And we'll try both ways. So let's start by just typing in honey. So the system will then ask you a series of questions depending on how specific it needs to get in terms of the different types of honey. And you'll find that if you play around with this, you'll find that each country has very different requirements and different subcategories for each product. In this case, it's fairly straightforward. Japan is just natural honey. So we'll select that and confirm that. And then what is this out for you here is it shows you what Japan's rate normally is that MSN rate is most favored nation rate. That's the rate that they set to the WTO I talked about earlier on 25 and a half percent. So if you don't have a free trade agreement with Japan and you are exporting honey into that market, that is the rate that will be applied on that honey. Now what the system then shows you is any preferential rates that Canada has. And so here you see that because Japan is a member of the CPTPP under that agreement, Japan has agreed to phase out its tariff rates on honey. And so this year, it's 22.3%. It's slightly better than the 25 and a half percent that everyone else will pay. And over over the years, that is going to be gradually phased out to zero by 2026. So that's, you know, that's that's a good example of a product that, you know, we're going to see some good benefits from through these agreements. This system, of course, can can do other things as well. And so let's let's go back and try a different product and see if we can do a comparison. And so this time we're going to we're going to look up cherries that we're going to we're going to look it up by HS code. And the code for that is 0809.2 and so we may need to see what happens. Okay, there we go. So this is the code for cherry. And we're going to actually, we're going to go back first. Sorry, just exit the top. So we're going to go back and first we're going to select Vietnam. That's because I think Vietnam and Japan categories a little different. Okay, so then we're going to select the cherries there. And this is showing to Vietnam. And so things on cherries. This year that that rate is the same. But next year it's going to zero. So they've agreed to reduce those to zero almost immediately. Now we're going to go up to scroll up a little bit to underneath the code at the top. And we're going to say add to compare just to look right there. Yeah. And then we're going to click on the compared icon to the right side of the screen. And then it should ask us should ask us if we want to add more to the compare. So we're going to add there. Now we're going to this is now we can just change the country if we want to keep the same code, we can go back to Japan. For example, see how that looks. And find that and do the same thing. And it will figure out the same thing. You see the similar phase out. Now we're going to add that to compare as well. That's the top left. And then we're going to do one more. But this time we're going to get out of the CPTPP. We're going to add another one to compare. We're going to try Korea. Probably under South Korea. There we go. So you can see that it indicates beside the country named the agreement that's the relevant agreement. And we're going to add that to compare as well. And then we're going to take a look at our comparison. So just click to compare. So if you are considering various markets, and you're making a decision on whether they should enter a particular market, the visual may help with just sort of seeing how that phase out process looks. And maybe it doesn't make sense for exporting at the moment. Maybe they want some plan for a few years down the road when the tariffs are a little better. So that is just a very basic high level walkthrough of Canada's tariff finder. There are a few other functions. But if you're interested, please just play around with it. And hopefully it's useful. Now I'm going to pass things over to Kevin. So great. Thanks, everybody. So Ben and Chelsea have done a great job now of creating a huge demand for your for you guys. And now they're knocking the door going off. Now what do we do? We know we can enter these markets. But we don't know how to do it as a company. And we don't know how to do it as an organization in the area. So we have a trade readiness and services branch as part of the ministry. And our job is to help promote international trade through the region. We have service sector experts as well as several programs. I'm going to highlight the program side of things. But we do have experts in areas such as fintech, international education, agriculture, clean tech, and ICT, for instance. So they're happy to answer questions or travel out and meet with your companies at any time. So some of the key programs we have are we the Canadian Agriculture Partnership Program, the expert navigator program, the trade accelerator program. And of course, if you've not heard of it, our extensive trade investment network around the country on their folks a little bit on each of these programs and give you some very high level information. So it gives you a little bit of takeaway. So the next slide we're talking about the Canadian Agricultural Partnership Program. What is it? Well, we deliver this in partnership with the BC Ministry of Agriculture and the Federal Agency Equivalent Agency. The focus on our side is to help promote international trade for companies around the world. And we do that two ways. We have the inbound trade programs and we have the outbound trade programs for the domestic side of things. What we try and do is we bring international buyers to the province. So they're actually dealing directly with their companies and they're ready to make purchases. So they're not kicking tires, they're not checking things out. They're here after we buy things. For instance, the Comox Seafood Festival, we had almost 70 buyers from around the world attending, meeting with companies looking to purchase. We have a new trade mission coming in in the next, I think next month or so, traveling to three cities Vancouver and Kelowna and Bailana believe they'll have 10 buyers with them and they're meeting with 70 companies. And the key is for these trade missions or these meetings are they want to meet directly with the decision makers. So we're not looking for somebody who's taking information back. They want to meet with the companies or the agents who actually negotiate the deal right then and there. Our outbound missions, the other side is the international side. So we are actively sort of trying to showcase our companies and their expertise around the world. So we organize trade missions that are typically paid for in some respects or if not paid for we subsidize in terms of making sure that there are activities, meetings, events that are key for potential business dealings going on. And you can see an extensive list there. We don't live in ourselves. So the U.S., Europe and Asia are covered off by these various agreements. And this is a typically a three year agreement that we negotiate with the federal government. So you do know we have some sort of stability that a company goes one year. There is a potential to go the next year. The next program I want to talk about and hopefully many of you have heard is the Expert Navigator Program. This is a key sort of program for the ministry and it is delivered in the region. It's a free service. We have six Expert Navigators located in various cities, but they do cover off the various regions. So as one in Duncan, Port Albertney, Prince Rupert, Prince George. So Austin Creek has a halftime advisor right now, Vernon and Nelson. They are designed to be one stock shop. They work with companies who are thinking about exporting to companies who are already exporting. We don't, you know, we don't try and differentiate in terms of expertise or level of expertise. We want them to start thinking about exporting as quickly as possible. And we want to help them think about the hurdles, such as free trade agreements, what markets to go into. Are they already exporting into the U.S.? Can we expand that or grow them somewhere else? It is what I call a cradle-of-grave type service. You can access it anytime. You can continue to access. But the key is that we're trying to make sure that we get companies to think diversification and new markets. One of the new features of this program is just recently being announced as a full-time program by the minister. But we also have an agreement with Western diversification where we have three full-time advisors focusing on three key priority areas. And these areas are indigenous, women and youth. For our purposes, youth is defined as less than 29 for this program. The federal government and the provincial government have different levels of criteria, but we've agreed to an under 29 being the criteria for this program. Those three people have provincial-wide service. So they're located, one, the indigenous is located in camloops and women and youth advisors are located in Vancouver. However, they are targeting the whole province and help supplement their extra navigators expertise. So you know this is again I encourage everybody to try and take advantage of this program or refer companies to them. They help with their business planning. They help with their export planning. They help with their sort of local referrals to federal programs that are on a timely basis for their accessing programs when they need to be accessing them. The next program we have is TAP. And this is a trade accelerator program that is mainly I would call Lower Mainland Victoria Focus. It is a more extensive program. It's for companies that typically are already exporting and are really now in the process of fine tuning or really going hard into a new market. It is covered over six weeks. There's a two-day workshop, a single one-day export plan with experts brought in, and then finally a mentorship program. And the idea of the mentorship program is to provide feedback on their plans and give them advice on the next step. This is typically is delivered through the World Trade Center Vancouver. And if fully financed, it would be about a $2,500 to $5,000 workshop. However, if it's referred to by either yourselves or some ministry or an extort navigator, it is free. As I said, it is typically a Lower Mainland Focus, but they are delivering a workshop in Prince George in November, for instance, and they do happen to go into Kelowna and countless the odd time. The idea was that they did not want to duplicate the export navigator services, so they're a little selective in where they go. However, companies in the region, if they're going to Vancouver, can absolutely access the program as well. As I say, it's simply a referral, and it's a free seminar. Very useful, really get them ready to go and get them ready to export almost immediately. The final sort of slide I want to talk about, and if you aren't aware of it, is our Trade Investment Network around the world. Very unique in terms of it. It is strictly BC-focused. There is the Global Affairs Canada who have a far more extensive network, so if we don't have representatives, say South America there, we would work with the Global Affairs Canada. However, if we do have an office, they are there to work strictly for our BC companies. So they may be 50 companies going on a trade show, but if there's 10 BC companies, we contact our Trade Investment Representative, let's say in Jakarta. That representative will set up a trade mission for them. They'll set up meetings. They'll try and organize high-level introductions that will help us to facilitate businesses. An example, for instance, is we just had a company go to the FinTech Festival in Singapore last year. We managed to get them to speak at a pitch, which wasn't something that typically was open to Canadian companies. They ended up winning it, $100,000 in Singapore money, and now a year later have signed a major deal with a Singapore bank to provide their services. So an extremely good way to an opportunity for our companies to showcase themselves around the world. And as I said, this is also a free service. These representatives are on the ground, local experts who are ready to do the work for the companies there. They also do bring them in to BC as well. So we do have an opportunity to meet them while they're traveling the province. For instance, there's an international educational conference in Whistler where they met with a number of companies. We do bring managing directors in and they will do a regional tour trying to meet as many companies and talk about local investments and trade opportunities as possible. So the intent for these is really to sort of highlight and showcase our BC companies on an international stage and act as somewhat of their business representatives and make sure they get value for those trips. If you do know companies are going to trade shows, please let us know. We can help either organize those meetings or we can help refer them to some subsidy programs like the CanExport program the federal government delivers to help offset some of their costs. So our contact information is on the next slide or at the end of the slide, but please feel free to reach out at any time and we're here to help. So thank you and if there are any questions we can take those I guess. Thanks a lot. Before we do, I'll just quickly run through these resources. So we talked about Canada as a carefinder. The reported trade barrier site there is somewhere where the businesses can go to let the federal government know about anything that they're encountering in their markets. BC export navigator that's been talked about. We've got the Canada FDA guide for municipalities there as well and then the contact information are emails for all three of us and BC trade and investment representatives websites and trade Canada's trade commissioner service which is sort of the federal equivalent of that CIR network. And so all of that is there and I guess I'll turn it back over to Jessica. Great thank you so much everyone. I'll just leave that information up there in case you want to jot down any of the names of the presenters to get in touch with them with any further information. We haven't had any other questions come in but if you want to take it we have a couple minutes now you can always pop your questions in and our panelists can answer the questions offline and respond to you in email if they don't have time now. But it doesn't look like we have any else anymore coming in so I would just like to say thank you again to the presenters that and for making the time to share this really valuable information with our audience. And if you do want to share this information it will be posted like I said on our website economic development on the economic development site under BC ideas exchange. And if you are not already subscribed to our webinar series I encourage you to do that we have a lot of topical and interesting webinar topics coming up for the rest of the month including what local governments can expect with the new ride hailing framework what local governments how they can benefit with the local government legislation and some interesting topics planned for November. If anyone has any suggestions or any information that they would like to hear on a webinar topic they can email us at economic development at gov.bc.ca and I'll just pop up pop up our email there so if anyone would like to send us an email that would be great after the webinar today please do fill out the survey that will be sent to you in about an hour it does help us improve our webinars and for the next time and make sure that we're taking your feedback and incorporating them to make sure that each experience is better. So thank you everyone if I haven't seen any more questions come in so I'm going to sign off and close the webinar. Thanks again to our panelists. Thank you. Thank you.