Thanks for the question. Let me unpack it a little bit. You've talked, in a sense, both about data transfer and data localization, and they're different things.
The issue of data localization is with regard to a country requiring businesses to store or retain personal information locally, ensuring that that information enjoys the protections that their national laws provide. In fact, it is also what our national government has done as part of a process that was started by the Conservatives, and continued by the Liberals in terms of a cloud-computing strategy, recognizing that there might be some information held by government that we would not want stored on servers elsewhere.
What I think we are likely to see in NAFTA and what we saw in the TPP, largely at the behest of the United States since they represent some of the companies that tend to store large amounts of data and tend to store it in the United States, are attempts to preclude countries from adopting mandates to require that data be stored locally. We're certainly seeing some commercial impetus for doing so.
That's why those big companies have set up those servers in Canada. They're responding, in a sense, to market demand for better protection, but I would argue that Canada should certainly be free to say that for certain kinds of information, we want to ensure that it is retained in Canada so that Canadians know that it is adequately protected and subject to Canadian rules. I am expressing concern that as part of the trade negotiations, we may find attempts to override that.
That, I should note quickly, is different from restrictions on transferring data across borders. We've also seen the United States focus on stopping restrictions doing that, but as Professor Bennett just explained, the European Union has tried to do exactly that. They have tried to create restrictions on the ability to transfer data across certain borders.