Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It's a delight to see you again after a couple of days of absence.
Mr. Kneen, thank you very much for being here today. The FAIT committee has just come back from Europe, where we met with European parliamentarians, both in the European Parliament and outside of it. We had some private meetings with European parliamentarians who are very concerned about investor-state provisions that of course are in both the Canada-Panama agreement and the negotiations going on with Europe.
You mentioned some of the cases in which companies have used the investor-state provisions to override decisions that are made by governments to protect the environment and for social development. Could you talk a bit more about those cases?
Are you concerned about the increasing use of mailbox companies, companies that no longer have any relationship to the bilateral itself, but that use the fact that they've incorporated somewhere else in order to use the investor-state provisions that are contained within Canadian agreements to go after those local governments or those national governments? Particularly in the case of Panama, we've heard testimony that there are four times as many corporations in Panama as there are in Canada. I could pick up a phone and incorporate myself tomorrow as a Panamanian corporation and thus be subject, regardless of where my real base is, to the investor-state provisions, and I can start suing any local government that makes a decision I don't like. How concerned are you about that aspect of this agreement?