International Trade committee  There's not really a provision for them to do that. There are provisions related to national treatment, most-favoured-nation treatment, and performance requirements. There are requirements for fair and equitable treatment. There are requirements against expropriation. Those are the kinds of challenges that we'd see in an investment dispute, not challenges related to the ratchet.

International Trade committee  It's going to be even faster now. The Vienna convention basically says that if you're a dispute settlement panel, you first of all look at the words of the texts. If there's any ambiguity in the words of those texts, you can look to supporting evidence. The joint interpretive instrument is intended to be just that.

International Trade committee  Yes, it was. We did make it clear that any tankers coming in from foreign countries, and in particular the European Union, would be subject to the same safety requirements and the same environmental requirements that we have domestically. If they fall short in any of those areas, there clearly would be action taken against those areas.

International Trade committee  Particularly from a CETA perspective, one of the things we've seen is that most Canadian businesses—I'm setting aside the large multinationals—have acquired a degree of comfort with the domestic market and a degree of comfort with the U.S. market. They're both understandable, and they're used to them.

International Trade committee  Well, I'll try, but it's not an easy question. The separation agreement is going to be immensely complicated. First of all, they have to work out exactly how close—or not close—they're going to be. Are they going to be part of the common market within the EU or are they not? Are they going to have a customs union or are they not?

International Trade committee  Yes, right. It depends a bit on the sector. There is an overall approach, but it also depends on the sector. If you're talking about the fish and seafood sector, there will be a particular focus on that and on helping the fish and seafood sector across Atlantic Canada to be able to access the EU market more easily.

International Trade committee  I think that's something that we need to put a lot of focus on, because the situation as we see it is exactly the way you've described it. We expect significant new traffic coming into Canada. It's largely going to come through the eastern ports. We want to make sure that those eastern ports are able to handle that increased level of traffic.

International Trade committee  A market imbalance? Are you referring to the safeguards?

International Trade committee  Let me give you a bit of context behind that first.

International Trade committee  In CETA, we negotiated an outcome that does not have any built-in safeguards of their own. There are no safeguards either way in any sector in CETA, but what we did do when it came to agriculture is that we preserved our right to be able to use the WTO special safeguard for agricultural products.

International Trade committee  That's right.

International Trade committee  Well, it's going to be a long-term project, for sure. As you know, the U.K. has been a keen supporter of CETA throughout the process, including up to the signature and all of the discussions leading up to that. They've also indicated an interest in being a part of CETA, at least until they get through their article 50 process of Brexit in terms of the rest of the EU.

International Trade committee  Yes, we have, and are doing that in increasing amounts. Again, the larger companies are easy. We can talk to them easily. We know who they are. It's really the small and medium-sized enterprises that are going to represent the greatest gains we can get out of CETA, but only if we can give them the information they need, talk to them about the opportunities that will exist in Europe, and help them along the way to be able to look at a market that they may not have looked at before.

International Trade committee  It's part of an overall plan that we've been developing over the past probably six to eight months. It's really centred around an investment strategy, a trade strategy, whereby we're trying to look at all of the various potential interests into the EU and to, first of all, have some very targeted information that we can provide them and, secondly, assistance we can provide them, whether it's counselling or advice in the particular markets they might be interested in.

International Trade committee  Right. For all of our previous tariff quotas on cheese—and there haven't been very many—we have always allocated them on the basis of the companies that existed. The WTO tariff quota is the largest one. Companies who are interested have been having allocations of that quota for a very long period of time.