OpenMedia, over its four years of working on the TPP, has attended multiple Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiating rounds. I've been to two myself; my colleagues have been to some. We've attempted to set up meetings with all of the negotiating partners who are international organizations, so we've met with many of the different negotiators from lots of different countries. Most recently, I met with them in Washington in December 2015.
I think it's worth noting that 600 corporate lobbyists were allowed access to the full text and probably wrote many of the provisions that we now see in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But inviting people to a public hearing, while it's fantastic that we're actually taking this step, doesn't necessarily involve their input into drafting the agreement. I think it's worth noting that even the Canadian negotiator wouldn't meet with OpenMedia, an organization founded in Canada, with hundreds of thousands of Canadians speaking out about this issue. They refused to meet with us. They refused to hold up their promise to not degrade Canada's copyright legislations when our executive director, Steve Anderson, met with her in Auckland in 2012.
So we have been taking every opportunity.... In fact, when Steve was in Auckland in 2012, what they called the stakeholder meeting was basically a group of kettled protesters standing outside of the hotel. I think the concept that folks haven't engaged properly or haven't looked for those channels isn't necessarily it.
To your last question, we wouldn't sign a non-disclosure agreement because we believe that Canadians have a right to know about what we're discussing and what kind of negotiations we're having. Although, I will mention that we were accidentally sent a non-disclosure agreement by one of the other negotiators, and we had a good look through it. That was interesting to us to see what kinds of restrictions were being placed on the public officials, even of other countries, to not tell their own citizens about what was going on.