Okay. Thank you.
Maybe I'll just highlight one other aspect that I thought was significant in light of both the technical summary and the leaked draft.
The technical summary makes a claim that the right to regulate of Canada and of European governments has been preserved. There's also a reference to a protection of sovereign control over natural resources.
I word-searched “sovereign” and I word-searched “regulate” in the leaked draft. I looked at it closely. No provision states that the right of anyone to regulate is protected, or uses the words “sovereign control”. Perhaps it is in the treaty—we can't verify it, of course, until the text is public—but based on the leaked draft of the investment chapter I have seen, there are, I think, some significant issues that are outstanding.
The last point I'd like to highlight is this: why have an investment chapter that provides for investor-state arbitration at all in a trade agreement between Canada and the European Union? This is a question which a lot of people ask. When we think about the history of investor-state arbitration, really it was to provide security to foreign investors in countries where the domestic courts were not thought to be reliable and independent.
I really don't think that claim can be made about Canadian courts and European courts. If there are concerns about some of the accession countries in Europe, Canada already has FIPAs with almost all of those countries. For Canadian investors in Romania, for example, or in Poland, if we had concerns about those courts—I'm not saying we should, but if we did—Canadian investors already have access to investor-state arbitration in existing FIPAs for those countries.
My question really is this: what's wrong with the European Court of Justice, with the European Court of Human Rights, with Canadian courts, with the Supreme Court of Canada, such that foreign investors need to have the right to opt out of the court system and bring claims against the public purse in Canada and Europe to an arbitration process that is clearly not independent, open, procedurally fair, and balanced in the manner of a judicial process, whether domestic, regional, or international?
That concludes my comments. Thank you very much.