This is a really ticklish issue. As a former official and a negotiator, obviously there's a great advantage in not having to deal with the political noise off-stage of people criticizing you for things that you're not doing—because that's often what happens. Much of the criticism has very little to do with what you're actually doing, but at the same time, because of the delicate nature of the negotiations, you don't want the other side to know exactly what you're thinking, and so on. So you need a certain level of confidentiality.
We worked out a compromise during the FTA and the NAFTA negotiations and the Uruguayan negotiations, which was basically the same compromise. We regularly briefed members of the sectoral advisory groups as well as the broader international trade advisory committee, and whenever we had an opportunity we wrote speeches for ministers in order to outline where we were going with things. The thing that we feared the most was ministers making statements in the House that would compromise our ability to negotiate.
You will appreciate, for instance, what kind of impact Mr. Clark's announcement in the House had one day, in response to a question, that supply management was part of the very warp and woof of this country and would not be part of the negotiations. Poof! Out went an important piece of coinage of ours that we needed to use. So, pfft, it was gone. So the less said by ministers without having a clear idea of what you're doing and thinking it through strategically, is helpful.
But in the case of the TPP, I have no idea what they're negotiating, other than a very broad outline based on the document they put out two years ago—which any first-year graduate student could write up for me as to what would be contained in a quality trade agreement. It didn't take ministers sitting around a table approving it. It's a fairly rudimentary document, and that's all we know.
I think it is not in the best interests of either the negotiators or the government to maintain this level of secrecy.