In fact, if countries within NAFTA do violate national treatment, there is a provision there. Now, you could argue that under the WTO, which is not free trade, the WTO is not free trade to the extent that an FTA represents.... My bias is that I believe that investor-state provisions are important and I think that they are essential.
I do acknowledge that there are challenges with the wording of chapter 11. This is really helpful to us. We need a longer discussion, frankly, on chapter 11, where we bring in more witnesses at some point and we can actually go through this, because I know people from the business community who believe in investor-state provisions but who believe that chapter 11 is poorly worded.
If a Canadian company manufactured 2,4-D, for instance, it would not have the same right to challenge the government. It would not have the same right. Chapter 11 does provide more rights in some ways to a foreign company than to a Canadian company. That could be argued as being wrong. With MMT, that ban was a case of the government using interprovincial trade barriers as opposed to an outright ban, and as such it seemed to be a circuitous way to approach it, and as such it violated the principles of national treatment.
But I think the fact that we do have investor-state provisions and national treatment is very important to Canadian companies and to Canadian jobs. The question is, what are the problems with chapter 11, and how can we address those problems? I think that's where we're going to have to drill down on it at some point.
But I really appreciate your help in shining some light on this issue this morning. I just think we're going to need a lot more light from a lot more people and a lot more time to really understand this. I think we have to be fairly open-minded in looking at it.