Absolutely.
Once again, Professor Geist has done a lot of fantastic work on this.
Essentially, we see in the TPP, and we see through access to information that has been done in the last several years, that there is a price of admission for Canada to enter the talks, and that originally the U.S. actually didn't want us to be a part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
While we were doing our copyright review and passing the Copyright Modernization Act in 2012, there was a U.S. demand on copyright and anti-counterfeiting reforms as a condition of entry. Just prior to entering negotiations, Canada agreed to these further conditions, and also that it can't hold up any chapter of the agreement if it is the lone opponent, which we did find ourselves, as many of the copyright provisions....
We have one of the more flexible systems of intellectual property and copyright that attempts to strike that balance with the rights of the public. The access to the public domain, as we all know, creates excellent innovation and opportunities for us to innovate and share culture. Unfortunately, we were the lone resister at the end with copyright terms, and we had to cave. We ended up with 20-year copyright term extensions, and in fact we ended up with absolutely no phase-in period for copyright term extensions.
If Canada ratifies the TPP, we will see 20 years of nothing at all entering the public domain. The costs to consumers are estimated at hundreds of millions per year. I think it is worth recognizing that TPP negotiators and senior officials were absolutely warned that Canada was at a disadvantage going in, yet nothing was done to address the issue.