Thank you very much for your question. I apologize for answering in English. I actually grew up in Montreal, but my French is so rusty I'd be worried about giving everybody in the room tetanus, so I'm going to answer in English.
The e-commerce provisions are one of the innovative features in the treaty. They're not in CETA; they're not in NAFTA; they're not in GATT. They recognize that trade in the 21st century is quite different from what it had been. We now have powerhouses in Silicon Valley—the Googles, the Facebooks, and others—which we hope we can develop in Canada. Those have made major, major inroads into foreign countries. They found in some of those countries that there were effectively attempts to block their market access. The goal of the e-commerce chapter was to take the GATT's framework, which not only dealt with tariff barriers but started to deal with non-tariff barriers, and to look at what were going to be the barriers in the 21st century, and to then try to deal with those in the same way that the GATT and others dealt with other non-tariff barriers. So when you look at e-commerce, some of the barriers related to recognition of signatures and documents, one out of the way, and they've done that in a very elegant manner by referring to two international documents. They've set out a whole set of rules as one provision, but it has very extensive implications and benefits for Canadian businesses.
It also has benefits with respect to transborder data flows. If you think about Canada, we actually have a very sophisticated IT sector that is very good with networks. There is the potential benefit that we could leverage all those technologies and do business in other countries. In fact, some of our major FIs today run their foreign affiliates from Canada, so we want to be sure they're able to continue to do that.
There are some exemptions for FIs in the commerce chapter, but in general it restricts non-tariff barriers that are specifically related to e-commerce.