Conservative Trade Critic Gerry Ritz has been travelling the Prairies talking to agricultural producers about the challenges they're facing.
Ritz says trade rules, provincially and internationally, are a labyrinth of dead ends and blind alleys, but there are victories out there.
"We can learn a lot from that as well, governments love to take credit for the success, but in the end it's always business to business that makes it happen," Ritz says.
He says when he was agriculture minister they put together value chain roundtables where people could share their mentoring stories and the Access Management Secretariat which identified markets and what it would take to get into them and if there was glitch in market access they went in and identified it and brought the proposed solutions to his ministry.
As for the new inter-provincial Canada Free Trade Agreement, he says it's a first step, but that's all.
"There is a tremendous amount of expertise and energy that's been put on inter-provincial trade but at the end of the day everybody claims to have done a better job, I'm not seeing it yet, the list of exemptions outweighs the list of access, in my mind," he says.
Source : Steinbachonline