I find this shocking, that the international community said they're worried about Canada; they can't hurt our feelings. You've certainly done a good job of painting us as international pariahs, yet the global intellectual property index ranks us sixth out of 22 in terms of property, trademark, patent protection.
We're ranked fourth in the World Economic Forum. The recent February study to the USTR by major software competitors said that the ranking of Canada as an outlaw state was completely irresponsible. And it's not helpful.
You can come in and you can get everybody worked up, but the issue here is how we separate legitimate counterfeit issues from the fact that you set up a secret process that circumvents the WTO and sidesteps the WIPO treaty when this is where we deal with intellectual property.
Now you might say WIPO is not strong enough, but that has been, since 1996--and before that going back to the Berne Convention--how we do this. Now suddenly we have a whole separate deal. So we have a small, select club that is involved in ACTA. Who gets to join? Are we going to take this to WIPO and be WIPO-compliant, or does ACTA supercede the provisions that we've all agreed to internationally for WIPO?
That is where we deal with intellectual property. We deal with the other issues at the WTO. Now we have a whole different private setup among, what, six, seven, ten countries when the majority are outside of that. I don't see why that's of benefit to Canada.