I'll take this one.
It's not entirely accurate to say that the EU doesn't use investor-state provisions. What the EU does is that they've negotiated bilateral investment treaties, or BITs, as they're referred to.
In many cases, they are negotiations that occur between, say, Germany and an African nation, in which case there would be the sense that there are other ways. If your rights are compromised as an investor, perhaps you could use something like your aid that you're giving to the country as a way of bringing them back around to seeing things in the way that the Germans would want them to see it.
The reason that this has been controversial has not been because it's an investor-state versus state to state. It has been controversial because it's a tug of war between the member states vis-à-vis the European Union, which is one authority to negotiate investor treaties under the Lisbon Treaty. That's why. There has been a bit of a push-back, but if they had serious concerns about it, they wouldn't be discussing investor-state, as they will be in this coming round.
The reason why it's important for Canada is that Canada, even though it's a country that's incredibly reliant on trade and incredibly reliant on sales to foreign affiliates and things of that nature, is not a country with huge resources, especially when you compare it to a country like the United States, China, or India, or Germany, for that matter. Therefore, too, the expectation that every time you may have a problem you have to basically petition your government to act on your behalf is not only unwieldy, it's unrealistic.
Frankly, I think the investor-state provision has benefited us under NAFTA. If you look at the number of actual cases that have been brought forward under it, it's minuscule, considering the volume of trade and the flows of investment that occur. The stock of investment is half a trillion dollars. The number of cases where they've exercised the investor dispute resolution mechanism within NAFTA is fairly minimal. Also, in a global rules-based trading system, even if we're talking about a bilateral negotiation, again, for a country of 35 million people, it's in our benefit to have binding, clear, concise, and actionable rules that govern our relations with other trading partners. We simply are not at the same level and scale as the United States.
Just to give you an anecdote, if you go to the WTO and sit in on any negotiation, you'll see that the size of the delegation tells it all. That acts as a proxy for the types of resources they can dedicate to these types of things.