The official visit of Prime Minister Gabriel Attal to Ottawa, Quebec and Montreal will give new impetus to partnerships between French and Canadian companies in all areas. After the Senate vote rejecting the bill authorizing the ratification of the comprehensive economic agreement between the European Union and Canada, a rejection which does not close the debate, we must recall everything that the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement ( CETA, CETA in English) between Canada and the European Union is positive for businesses in both countries.
Since 2017 and its provisional entry into force, the fears that were expressed have not been verified. The agreement allowed an unprecedented opening of the Canadian market to our exporters and investors. Sales of French products in Canada have increased by a third in six years. French agriculture and agri-food indisputably benefit from CETA, with a trade surplus with Canada which has tripled and very positive results, particularly for wines, spirits and cheeses, which were subject to high customs duties and whose geographical indications are now much better protected.
Canadian beef with hormones, banned by the European Union, has not flooded the French market, quite the contrary. In 2023, we imported 29 tonnes of beef from Canada from the only slaughterhouses authorized to export to the European market, while we exported 407 tonnes to Canada. We have not imported a single ton of Canadian pork.
Sales of French industrial products have doubled in certain sectors. We have signed a Franco-Canadian agreement which will bring Canadian environmental standards closer to ours, and preserve our sovereignty.
An advantage insufficiently mentioned during the debate in the Senate, CETA offers European companies much greater access to public markets, from which French companies have been able to take advantage. Before CETA, only Canadian federal public procurement markets were open to European competition. The provincial and municipal markets, now accessible, concern areas in which French technologies are very efficient and correspond to Canadian needs: environment, energy, sustainable mobility.
Derichebourg has won five household waste collection contracts in Montreal and its suburbs. Alstom will equip the greater Toronto area with commuter train sets. CETA has encouraged investment in both directions. Stellantis is building a mega-factory for batteries for electric vehicles in Ontario. Michelin is launching a new project in its Nova Scotia factories. Thales has created a national center of digital excellence in New Brunswick. Sanofi is investing in the construction of a new vaccine factory in Toronto, for the Canadian, US and EU markets. Ardian and Tikehau in Montreal, Natixis in Toronto, have recently opened representations.
More than 1,000 French companies, the majority of which are SMEs, have a subsidiary in Canada.
Canadians are the fifth largest foreign investors in France, with 200 subsidiaries, and 54 new projects identified since the provisional entry into force of CETA. Canadian pension funds are increasingly interested in the French market.
CETA facilitates tariff-free access to a whole series of strategic minerals and metals essential to our energy and digital transition, currently supplied mainly by China and Russia. In a context of geopolitical upheavals and great uncertainties for international trade, CETA has created between Europe and Canada, who share the same values, a secure economic space, with transparent, stable, predictable rules of the game.
Like Canada from 2017, like the majority of our European partners, France must ratify it.