Great. Thank you for the questions.
To the first question, I don't know their actual ranking, but that's an easy one for us to get back to you on.
On their key concerns, most of the negotiations with Colombia--especially near the end, when we were talking about the specifics on cooperation, which was of significant interest to the Colombians--focused on the issues you talked about. They wanted to know about Canada's practices with respect to corporate social responsibility and how they could learn from those experiences. They wanted to understand what we were doing on chemicals management. They wanted to understand what we were doing about biodiversity, which is a very important issue for the Colombians. I suspect that reflects where their negotiations went and what their preoccupations are, but obviously you would have to ask the Colombian government to get a more involved answer on that.
On managing the risks of economic growth, there are specific provisions we're looking to get into the side agreement and the formal FTA. They will require that countries provide a high level of environmental protection, improve their environmental governance, effectively enforce their domestic environmental laws, maintain procedures, and conduct environmental impact assessments. They will ensure that enforcement-related laws and administrative rulings are available to the public to provide sanctions or remedies for violating an environmental law, and that fair, equitable, and transparent proceedings occur. Those are some of the provisions we're looking to get into the side agreement that actually address a number of the issues you were talking about.
On recognizing core environmental principles, a pretty standard provision that we look at is what we call the MEA conflict-of-law provision, which is in the formal trade agreement. I'll ask my colleagues from DFAIT to comment on that further. But it effectively says that those multilateral environmental agreements would prevail in the event of an inconsistency between the free trade agreement and the obligations set out in those multilateral environmental agreements. That's part of the FTA.
On enforcement, I already talked about one of the provisions in the side agreement that deals with effective enforcement. There is also a dispute resolution mechanism in the environmental side agreement. It stops at the ministerial level and does not have a panel.
Thank you.