 This is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Hello, everyone. My name is Chelsea Luciani. I'm a senior manager in the trade policy and negotiations branch in the BC Ministry of Jobs, Economic Development and Competitiveness. I'm here with my colleague Ben Kalisnik, a fellow senior manager who will be delivering today's presentation. Ben is our South Korea expert in the office, having lived in South Korea for five years. We are really pleased you could join us today and hear about the opportunities in the Canada-Korea Free Trade Agreement for businesses in Canada. More generally, the BC government has been working to raise awareness of the opportunities in Canada's free trade agreements for businesses, workers and communities, and we have been traveling around the province for the last year to do so. We have held dedicated sessions for women-owned businesses, today's included, and Indigenous businesses as well. If you're interested in attending a future session, please send us an email afterwards and the community that you live in, and we will let you know when we next come to your community or next have a webinar. So before I hand off things to Ben, I'd like to go over a few webinar technical details. So I've got on the screen a bit about what the control panel looks like. So there's an audio pane with a questions pane, and you should see today's presentation available in the handout panel. On the side is the orange arrow that lets you shrink the panel to the side of the screen. It automatically shrinks it if you don't do anything for a while. Under audio, you have two options, via your computer or voice over IP, or by zoning in. If you click on phone call, it'll give you a phone number to call with an access code for this webinar and a personal identification number for you individually. You should also see a drop-down menu where you will find today's presentation. Questions are encouraged at any time, but as you are muted, please put them in the questions pane whenever you think of them, and you may need to click on the drop-down arrow to open the pane. I will ask your questions to Ben, and if we don't get all your questions, I will try and get you an answer via an email after the webinar has finished. All right, so I'm going to hand off things to Ben Kaliznik. Great. Thank you, Chelsea. Hi, everyone. As Chelsea said, my name is Ben Kaliznik, and I'm also with the Trade Policy and Negotiations Branch, with the BC Ministry of Job, Economic, Development and Competitiveness. The branch that we work for represents British Columbia's interest in free trade agreements, also trade disputes that impact British Columbia, and also what we're doing right now, which is free trade agreement outreach and promotion. So thank you for connecting today to learn about the Canada-Korea free trade agreement and how that can benefit your business. The idea for this session first came about when we learned about the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada's Women-Only Business Mission to South Korea, and so once we started to develop a CKFTA pre-brief for that mission, the idea sort of blossomed and we wanted to send the invitation to as many women-known businesses in British Columbia that were interested in the Korean market and CKFTA as possible. My focus, of course, is British Columbia being from the BC Ministry, but I know that there may be others from outside of British Columbia on the call today, so please excuse some of the language that I tend to use as BC-specific and maybe even some of the examples, but please know that all of the provisions and benefits that are in the CKFTA are equally applicable to you, whether you're located in BC or otherwise. I, as Chelsea said, I lived in Korea for five years, and so I have some knowledge of the country and should be, you know, hopefully can answer some questions that you might have even outside of the CKFTA, but we'll see. We'll see what you might have. So this is just an overview of what I hope to go over today. I'm going to talk just a little bit about our ministry and what free trade agreements do, and then jump into Canada's free trade agreement before talking in more detail about the CKFTA. And then I'll finish off by going over a few resources before turning it over to AWZ with the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada to talk about the foundation and the great work that they're doing when it comes to trade meetings. Some of this material you may already know, some of it, on the other hand, can be quite dense and technical. So I hope that if you just take one thing away, you know that we are here to answer questions, like an answer question today, and I'll have my contact information up at the end. You can always feel free to reach out to us at our branch, and if we can't get to the answers you need on a trade agreement or a trade barrier, then we certainly will know who to put you in contact with. So the VC Ministry of Jobs, Economic Development and Competitiveness, the aim is really to make life more affordable for all British Columbians by building a strong, sustainable economy to work for everyone. There are many ways to foster this economic growth. One way is to encourage businesses to leverage some of the opportunities in free trade agreements. Goods and services can become more competitive. We can revitalize traditional industries. We can foster new ones and foster trade diversification as well and create jobs. One of the problems with this, of course, is that free trade agreements are long and they're complex and they're technical. And it's unreasonable to expect that most small and medium-sized enterprises have the time or the resources to be pouring through these long and technical agreements. Big businesses might have those resources, but small businesses are busy. They're creating jobs and they're running their businesses. And so through our FTA outreach program, what we're really trying to do is try to raise awareness of some of these opportunities and to provide some practical tools to businesses so that it makes it easier to navigate some of these agreements. Now, before we move on, I'm just going to pull up a whole question for everyone. So you can vote once the option comes up for you to do so. So the question is, which of these countries does Canada not have an FTA with? So the United States, Peru, Vietnam, China, and Ukraine. We'll just give you a couple of minutes or a few seconds to register your vote. And I forgot to mention no cheating by googling the answer. Okay, well, I think we'll close it off and see how everyone did. Okay, interesting. Okay, so the majority thought that the correct answer was Ukraine. And the second place came in is China. And yeah, the correct answer is China. We, Canada has engaged in some exploratory discussions on trade with China, but China is the only one in that that we don't have a free trade agreement with. And, you know, I know that the focus for today is the CKFTA, but if anyone has questions about any other agreements as well, I'm happy to go over that. Okay, so let's jump into just some basics on what free trade agreements do. Many of you probably already know some of this. But really the World Trade Organization is sort of the foundation of global trade. And of course, it sets the rules of trade between nations. So countries set their base paraphrase to the WTO and sign on to other agreements around trade, like government procurement, for example. And trade disputes can be settled through the WTO as well. Most favorite nation is something that you may have heard before. It really just means that a country cannot offer better trading terms to one country and not another unless it has a free trade agreement that allows it to do so. And so free trade agreements really build on the commitment that the countries make through the WTO. And a common way that a member would do that is by offering preferential paraphrase to another bilateral FDA partner. So what do those agreements do? Well, some free trade agreements are really kind of more just goods and care of focus. They focus on reducing care. But as time goes on, we've seen that FTAs are changing and they're really starting to cover many more areas of an economic relationship between countries. So whether that's small and medium-sized enterprise activity, e-commerce, and inclusive trade, they're really sort of growing. In terms of inclusive trade, some of the FTAs, in particular, have started to include provisions on things like gender, indigenous peoples, and as I said, FMEs, things like corporate social responsibility. And so some of these more modernized FTAs really signal the importance, ensuring that those benefits and opportunities from free trade agreements are really widespread and available to as many people as possible. And to be sure, inclusive trade is a priority for the government of British Columbia. So this is, I'm not sure how well you can see it, but this is a map showing Canada's free trade agreements and free trade talks. So it is color coded. If it's blue, then we've already got a completed and implemented free trade agreement with that country. And if it's sort of purplish, we've concluded negotiations but not yet implemented the agreement. And if it's green, we're just in negotiations or exploratory talks with the country. And so the good news here is if a business is looking to diversify and looking for other markets, Canada has been very busy on the free trade agreement front, and we now have 14 FTAs covering 51 countries. As you can see on the map, British Columbia in particular is well positioned geographically to take advantage of that. But I would note that, of course, a lot of the goods coming from Canada going to Korea, for example, are going to be coming through DC port as well. So we've got that conduit to access to Korea and the Asia Pacific and abroad everywhere. The good news about this as well is that these free trade agreements don't cancel each other out. And so you may be aware that we have, for example, free trade agreement with Mexico through NAFTA and hopefully soon to be Canada, the US-Mexico agreement. But we also have an agreement with Mexico through the comprehensive progressive agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, CPTPP. And those agreements are not the same. They differ in certain areas. And so the good news is the business can pick and choose which provision of which agreement better suits there. It might be a good time to just quickly talk about the role of the provincial government, British Columbia, in trade talks. I mentioned at the beginning that our branch's role is related to BC's interest as it relates to free trade agreements. And as you know, a lot of people are right in thinking that the federal government is sort of the lead on trade when it comes to trade agreements. They're the ones that enter into those agreements. As they do that, so the federal government will consult provinces and territories. It will also discuss interests with stakeholders, industry, or otherwise. And it develops Canada's interests and priorities in those negotiations. And so the province has a strong role to make sure that its interests are known as Canada develops its negotiated priorities. And of course, as once those agreements come into play, we know that some of those provisions apply to provinces as well, as well, and we need to be aware of those obligations. Provincial governments are also sort of responsible for ensuring that, in some cases, their municipal governments are aware of some of those obligations as well. Now with all of the talk about governments and free trade agreements, you wouldn't be blamed for thinking that we're talking about governments doing the trading, but that's usually not the case. It's businesses that are trading. And that's why we're doing what we're doing, and trying to bridge the gap between the signing and implementation of those agreements and the actual use of them by businesses. So let's jump now to the next slide and get into the Canada's Korea Free Trade Agreement. I know I apologize for how long that took, but thank you for your patience. So we're now into the details of the CKFTA. This agreement entered into force on January 1st, 2015, and this was Canada's first FTA in the Asia-Pacific. Before that, BC and Canadian companies were sort of at a disadvantage in Korea because the U and the U.S., in particular, already had trade deals there. And so this was an important deal for putting Canada on a level playing field, with many of their other, especially American and European competitors. Korea's got a population of more than 50 million people. I think you've probably already heard of some of these statistics in your pre-brief from December, if you're going on this mission. GDP of more than one and a half trillion U.S. dollars. And it's a very large market with, of course, a lot of opportunities to export BC and Canadian goods and services. Growing middle class. And I think Canadian goods have a very good reputation in Korea for being high quality and clean and things like that and safe. And so these are all great advantages for our products and services as well. So Korea, of course, is also a gateway to a lot of fast emerging markets in Asia. And when the CKFTA was being negotiated and implemented in BC and Canada as well, some studies were done about what that potential impact might look like. And you can see a figure there of 32%. So there were some projections that we would see some increases in our goods exports to South Korea. And the good news is that we have seen some of that. We've seen some overall export growth as well as some growth in some key sectors. And so I think, I can't speak for Canada, the government of Canada, but from the provincial governments of BC perspective, we think that that's great news. And we would really like to continue to build on that. Before I move on to some of the nuts and bolts of the CKFTA, I'm going to put up another poll question for you. So the next question is, which of these was not a top 25 BC goods export to South Korea in 2019? Let's give you guys another minute. Let's see how everyone did. Oh, so the majority thought that it was coffee. And I really don't blame anyone for thinking that. The correct answer is actually salmon. And a few people identified that correctly, which is good. Now I will a few notes on that question. I know it seems like a bit of a trick question. Salmon, we do know that last year our trade ministers were in Korea, and they learned of a promotion of DC salmon through the home shopping network, where it actually did incredibly well. The sales were very quick and there was some strong interest in salmon from DC. So that's great. I think that we can hopefully bank on that trend and continue to export more salmon. It just didn't happen to show up in the top 25 exports for 2019, but maybe that will change this year. Coffee is of course an interesting one. As you probably know, BC doesn't grow coffee. But what we do do is roast it. So that's where coffee shows up. And a little later we'll talk about things like rules of origin and what qualifies as a originating product. Free trade agreements cover things like that. And the short reason for why we can say that it was coffee from BC is basically that it was imported to BC from somewhere else and then it was roasted and underwent significant enough production to be considered eligible for that preferential treat. So as I said, we'll now move into some of the nuts and bolts and we'll focus on goods to begin with. And I'll talk a little bit about tariff elimination and this TKFTA. So it's of course tariff elimination and reduction make your goods more productive, sorry, more competitive. If someone told you that tariff of 100% on certain types of animal feed in Korea would be gone by this year under the TKFTA or that shrimp and prawn would be 20% cheaper now or your beer 30% cheaper by 2021, those are very compelling reasons to consider that market. Of course, that means that all of those products are that much cheaper than any competitors that don't have that preferential access. Tariff reductions also reduce the cost of your imports into Canada. So you might find that you can get an input from Korea much cheaper and use that for processed food, for example, or maybe it's just a piece of machinery that you need to operate in your business. As you can see on this table, overall TKFTA will eliminate, sorry, it has eliminated tariff on 95% of Canadian goods as of this year. But that number is going to jump all the way to 99.75% once the agreement is fully implemented by 2032. So it's going to take a little bit of time, but 10 years from now virtually everything coming out of Canada will enter Korea territory. I've just thrown a few main commodity categories out there, forest products, metals and minerals, agriculture and agri-food. You can see that the level of tariff elimination is quite similar throughout there. There are, I think if folks are interested, we can talk about some specific examples in a bit that might be more relevant to your business, but I've just pulled a few out that might be relevant. Things like pulses, tariffs out of Korea were as high as 608% and those will be eliminated by 2030. So that's a significant reduction and that's such a high tariff that of course that's not something that's likely to go down to zero quickly and that's why it's being phased out instead. Fresh chilled and frozen beef cuts, tariffs and safeguard duties of 40% will also be eliminated by 2030. Things like soybeans have tariffs as high as 500%. Those are going to be eliminated by 2024. And most Canadian, as you can see on the table here, most Canadian forest products are now duty free. And again, we can go over some specifics in a bit. Now, the one thing I want to flag is the note at the bottom of this slide that said preferential treatment has to be claimed. It's really important that people are aware of who is actually bringing a good in, if you're working with somebody in Korea, for example, or somewhere else, whoever is importing that good and is the importer of record needs to be aware that they need to claim that treatment in order to get those preferential rates. If customs officials are not going to automatically assume that your good is originating and that you need to get that preferential rate. So it's not always as simple as sticking the box, but if that's something that we can also help you with, if you want to make sure that you're getting that preferential treatment. So I'm just bringing up here on the screen something called Canada's paraffiner, the Canada, which Canada has a free trade agreement. So you really only need to know whether you're exporting or importing, and then the countries that you're interested in, and then your product. And your products can be searched by either keyword or by your HS code, if you know that, what that code is. And once you punch that in, it will probably ask you a couple of questions, just to narrow down to make sure it knows exactly what product you're talking about. If somebody wants to right now, we can pick an example. If you have a product that you're interested in, we can try through the CKFTA to see what the tariffs are like. And if you have a product that you're interested in, maybe you could just type it into the chat box right now, see if we have any volunteers. And if we don't have any volunteers, then I'll maybe I'll just pick a product. So we've got an example of shampoo. So we'll try that. So we're going to find South Korea, we're going to export shampoo. We'll use a keyword, and hopefully it won't be too difficult to. So this one is pretty straightforward. I went straight to the specific code, which is which is you can see it listed there. So Chelsea is just going to click on confirm that code. And so if you just input that and then scroll down, you can see BTO. So that MSN rate of 5% is what all countries would pay, sorry, all exporters would pay if they didn't have a free trade agreement with Korea. And under the CKFTA, that rate is zero. So it's tariff free in the CKFTA and has been tariff free for a couple of years now. So there is at least a 5% advantage over any competitors that don't have that access. Are there any other any other examples? Okay. So we're going to move on to B. And before Chelsea does that, I'll just mention that there is a compare function within this website. So if you're, for example, considering Korea, but you're also, say, considering Japan or some other markets, you can go back, you can add that Korea tariff rate to the compare function and then go back and add another country or two and just see how they compare. So now we've got some, once we put in beef, we've got some questions here about the type of beef. So the person who volunteered beef, what sort of beef are we considering here? Fresh or chilled. Okay, we'll do fresh or chilled beef. And bone in or bone lift. So as you can see, it's very specific. And let's just use short ribs as an example. See what that brings up. Okay, so this one is a little more complicated as you can see. So the MFN rate, the rate for all others is 30% quite high. Under the CKFCA, that rate is lower. As of this year, 2020, that rate is 24%. So there is an advantage there. Now you will notice that there's some additional information in there about weight. So up to 21,000 metric tons is the rate of 24%. But anything above that is 30%. So that's a tariff rate quota. So we can talk about that later. If you have questions about that, I'm certainly happy to answer that. Okay, so that's the Canada tariff finder. So just a very brief introduction. If you are interested in what sort of tariff rates your goods might be facing, I urge you to have a look at that. So let's move on to some other advantages for goods under the CKFCA. So in terms of goods, non-tariff barriers are really the differing requirements and standards, things like certification procedures and labeling requirements and other regulations related to human, animal, and plant health. And these are important, of course. We want our governments to be able to regulate for those reasons. But the problem is when you're starting to see overlap and duplication in some of these standards and certification procedures. So you need the same testing or very similar testing for your product in both Canada and Korea. That can really start to undermine some of the gains that you can have from things like tariff production. And so the good thing is that the CKFCA, just like most of our FTAs, contains some provisions to try to reduce these barriers. There is a committee on sanitary and phytosanitary measures. The CKFCA really tries to make sure that science and risk-based assessments are done instead of just resorting to regulators or political decision-making to implement things like certification and regulation. Rules of origin, I just mentioned that on the last slide. These can be very complicated and they might also be product-specific. The idea is really just the FTA aims to spell out the way that that product can gain that preferential treatment, as I said earlier. So if it's originating, if it's from the land or the sea, it's likely going to qualify automatically as originating from Canada. But where it gets a little trickier is when you have various inputs coming from other countries, countries outside of the free trade agreement area, so in this case outside of Canada or Korea, then it may become some sort of calculation or in any case there may be some consideration about whether or not it qualifies as originating. So this is, I'm simplifying this very quite a bit, but the good news is if there are any doubts about whether your product qualifies, most of our free trade agreements contain provisions including the CKFTA that allow you to apply to the customs agency that is responsible for where your product would be coming in. So in this case, free customs agency can provide something called an advanced ruling and so that takes some time, it can take one or two months, but and it may have a small fee attached to it, but it gives you certainty that your product will qualify as originating. And once you get that decision, it's binding, so you know and you have confidence that your product is not going to show up at the border and suddenly be face tariff that you didn't think you were going to face. Transparency and predictability, the idea with our free trade agreements is that we have agreed upon rules and with dispute resolution to back those up so we can really hold our trade partners accountable for the obligations that they've signed on to. And the last thing I'll mention in terms of goods are exceptions. So countries do maintain some exceptions where the preferential treatment is not extended. It's important to sort of check to make sure that your goods or your services as well are not included in those exceptions. A common example is agricultural products. We in many cases you might see tariffs not being eliminated or maybe being phased out over a much longer period or just simply aren't covered at all. And you know this is really just driven by countries that aim to protect some of their domestic industry. It's not so it's not unusual to see that and it's important to just make sure that it's not excluded. So these are some of the things on the slide here are not just applicable for goods. We'll talk a little bit about them with respect to services and investments as well in a few slides. Okay so that was good and let's talk a little bit about services. This is really it's sometimes harder for people to wrap their heads around what service would be would look like in a free trade agreement is how that might be considered. Of course a service in this case is really anything that can't be dropped on your toe. BC has access to secure and predictable market access for services in Korea now and that includes the Korea sorry the Korea procurement market and that is something I'll talk a little bit about in a couple of slides. Transparency and predictability the same idea with that we just talked about with goods applies here that Korea won't introduce any measures to limit the number of service suppliers for example is a great thing. The CKFTA uses something called a negative list approach and so this means that every service is covered and under that free trade agreement unless it is specifically listed and so this differs a little bit from some of our other agreements where we've taken a positive list approach and in that case as you can imagine it tends to capture more services under the negative list approach and so this is this can also be problematic over time so for example with with NASA you know something that was being negotiated back in the early 90s there were certain services that were that started to emerge after you know a decade or more that simply weren't considered because they didn't really exist back when the agreement was first being negotiated and so it can also the negative list approach can also be helpful for making sure that those are captured as time goes on. One big piece for services that you can see here is something called facilitated business entry and this is also known as temporary entry it is really just the the just allows for certain categories of professionals and business people and traders and investors to enter into a market for a set period of time or up to the set period of time to go and service an investment for example it really allows you to go in and get a feel for the investment environment or just you know talk to somebody who you're interested in dealing with what professionals are covered and the length of stay differs from agreement to agreement in the case of the CKFTA most of those provisions are very similar to NASA and so there are some differences in terms of the categorization of some professionals so if you have questions about whether or not you would be eligible please contact me and I can walk you through that. It tends to be anywhere from up to one to three years for that entry. The CKFTA specifically eliminates any needs for a economic needs test and the good thing about CKFTA is that it was very ambitious it provided Priya provided some access to Canada that it hadn't provided to any other any other of its trade partners up to that date. One last thing I'll mention about temporary entry on the CKFTA is that it also covers sources of those who are seeking to enter that market on temporary basis and as I said on the last slide there are some exceptions as well to be mindful of so let's move on quickly to investment again greater certainty stability and transparency is really the aim of the investment chapter of the CKFTA minimum standard of treatment for how investors are being treated so typically no worse than their own investors that's important for giving that investor a confidence but they won't be treated unfairly. There are also limitations on the number of enterprises that they carry out a specific economic activity there are protections against discriminatory treatment there are protections from things like expropriation without providing timely prompt and adequate compensation and just like the services provisions that we just talked about in the previous slide this is also based on a negative approach so hopefully that covers more than would ordinarily be covered. So let's quickly move on to government procurement I'm just looking at the time I want to leave some time for everyone to have questions if they have this is of course as you know governments buy a lot of goods and services and each of our free trade agreements differ in terms of what that access looks like the general idea with the government procurement chapter is that that the procurement is transparent and partial and really accessible to all businesses and so what this means for for you and for various industries sort of differs depending on what what they're interested in what sort of goods and services they have to offer not always not always relevant when it comes to government procurement the main thing that you need to keep in mind is coverage and threshold so in terms of the coverage this is really just well two things it's the types of goods and services that might be covered for one the other is just the level of government that is covered by the by the agreement so under the CKFTA we're really just talking about the national and sort of made more major arms of the government and this differs a little bit from some of our other agreements that actually go down to a much more local level so again it's you know I've got some links up here on the screen and the second one in particular is more English focus and allows you to go in and search some of the opportunities that currently exist in the Korean government procurement market the threshold is anything above 100 million won which is you know roughly a hundred thousand dollars but not not exactly so anything about that level that's the threshold you would be eligible as a Canadian goods or service supplier to bid on and so if you go into that link or one of those links you can navigate some of those opportunities and see if there's anything of interest there the the one thing I'll notice or note of course is that these these obligations are reciprocal as well so Korean visitors also have access to the Canadian market and so of course it's great that we have opportunities to bid on in Korea but we also should be mindful that there may be increased competition that's coming in to bid on some of the opportunities available in the Canadian market as well okay so before we move off of government procurement let's just do one last poll question and this is about agricultural goods which Canadian agricultural exports of Korea has experienced the most growth since the implementation of the CCFTA okay well we'll close this one off as well and see how everyone did okay so most said that crude canola oil followed by dog and cat food and pork and pork products and the correct answer here is dog and cat food and this this actually grew from just over six million dollars in exports in 2014 to 21 more than 21 million dollars in 2018 so that was an increase of almost 250 percent and this is really just there were there are tariffs of five percent on these types of products in Korea and so that's that's a that's a good help for for increasing those exports of course as you may know there is also a very big market for a dog and cat food premium dog cat food in Korea a lot of people have pets there and a lot of people want to keep them fed so some good opportunities there so let's move on now to the last slide this is just a resources slide okay okay so this is a mixture of online resources and just some of our offices as I said at the beginning we're here to help our branch and our international trade division is here to help we've also got great connections with the federal government and if there's something that we can't help you with we can certainly advocate with them that some and you should be raised we've got the Canada Terrifier finder link there at the beginning as well as a website where you can go and report a trade barrier if you do encounter a trade barrier please register it is there but we'd also be happy to hear about it BC's export navigator is listed here if you are based in BC this is really just community-based advisors that provide free support and ongoing guidance to help your business grow outside of British Columbia we've also got a link here for signing up for sanitary and technical notifications so this is things that countries are implementing or considering implementing that you may want to be aware of so for example a country may be bringing in a new labeling requirement or something like that and then we've got Mai and my director's contact information is there as well as the executive director with the trade readiness and services branch also within our ministry and the last two links there are one is the trade and investment representatives so BC has a network of trade and investment reps around the world who are really just there to promote BC as a destination for investment as a good partner for trade and innovation and a source of course for good quality services and good and the last link is Canada's trade commissioner service which you know is really more of a national similar idea but at a national level so those are our resources and I appreciate you listening in today to hear about information on the CKFTA it's a lot of information I know a lot of technical information to to sort of condense down into a short presentation so if there are any questions that come up if you have any questions right now I can I can answer them otherwise I will switch over to hear from the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada so if you have any questions please just type them in okay all right well I guess there are no questions if if if any come up please go ahead and text them in before we before we finish off today or please just send me an email and I'd be happy to chat and right now we're going to unmute believe Christine and maybe AW as well from the Asia Pacific Foundation so Jessica if you're there we would like to unmute me hello can you hear me this is Christine Nakamura hi Christine hi Ben first of all thank you so much for all the work you did and it was a very good presentation I think that in terms of the women that are going on our mission I'm sure they learned a lot from this because I certainly learned a lot and I'm a former foreign service officer so anyway great just to give an update on our mission AW is online I think as well are you AW if you can also unmute AW if he's still there sorry it's looking like he's just gone offline at the moment he's showing okay all right in any event unfortunately due to the emerging health concerns in the Asia Pacific region we've had to unfortunately delay and postpone our mission to South Korea but we have every intention to go forward with that mission as soon as we hit the peak and it starts to you know abate the situation abates we have a wonderful delegation a very strong delegation of women entrepreneurs and I think that the sectors that we're focusing on that are represented by our delegation are the health care health and wellness sector education sector and some agri-food that pertain to wellness so I think that this was extremely helpful and I'm sure that down the road because we'll have a few months to longer to prepare for the mission that should questions come up from our delegation I'd like to I'd encourage them to contact you and we may do that directly from the Asia Pacific Foundation as well so again Ben thank you so much for taking the time and in essence given that there were no questions today I'm sure that questions will arise over the next couple months as we prepare finalize our preparations for our mission to South Korea so thank you thank you thank you for for that and thank you for organizing the mission and we we are here for sure to answer any questions that might come up and again I just want to emphasize it's not only questions on the CQFTA or free trade agreement we are we're here to walk through any sort of trade barriers that people may be encountering in markets that not necessarily we don't have that we don't necessarily have a free trade agreement with as well so yeah thank you Christine for yeah one other thing one other thing I'd like to emphasize being a former foreign service officer and I've I served in Korea for four years as well as head of the political economic section I'd like to emphasize that BC and Alberta and Ontario and the province of Quebec you all have representatives on the ground with whom we work very closely all of them are onside to help us with the mission as well in Korea and we will do that for our subsequent missions in total we will be doing four missions to Asia with Korea being the first one because of the bilateral FTA that's great that's so good to hear and we we wish you luck you and the attendees luck with those missions and yes we're we're we're here for any any questions thank you thank you very much we have a few delegates from BC so I'm sure they're online today but certainly this presentation was helpful for everybody across the nation and we have a very diverse group going from coast to coast so thank you very much once again Ben okay thank you Christine and before we sign off I'll just mention that we we have recorded this session and we'll make this available we can distribute a link for this to the attendees and also I believe you can access the presentation itself in PDF format if you look on the right hand side of your screen you should be able to click that and actually download it and if that doesn't work then then we're happy to distribute that to people as well Ben could we if there is a way of us distributing this to the rest of the delegates who are unable to join us today I think it would be very helpful for them as well absolutely yeah so I will I will send you Christine a link to the recorded session as well as the presentation itself wonderful please copy AW on it because we'll do our program manager he's done tons of work on this so okay okay thank you yes I thank you and thanks to AW as well and thank you everyone for joining today talk to you very soon take care bye bye okay bye