This is what we were talking about, that most of the trade agreements have very little now to do with tariffs. Traditional trade agreements are going more into the regulatory space. You see that with ISDS, the investor-state dispute settlement, which is in quite a number of trade agreements, including CETA and CPTPP, which give corporations the ability to sue governments when policies or rules are changed. The new trend has been within CETA, within TPP, and with NAFTA—somewhere in the old NAFTA we also have regulatory co-operation councils outside of NAFTA—that with each agreement, this regulatory co-operation is becoming more and more intense. With CETA we see it as a voluntary thing, where the two sides meet and talk about regulations, and there are committees. With the CPTPP it becomes much more intense. With the new NAFTA, this becomes even more intense.
Now we've gotten rid of the ISDS, so we can no longer sue when regulations get in the way of profits, but you have now a dispute settlement. When a corporation or an interested party doesn't feel that the regulatory co-operation things have been respected, they can go to state-to-state dispute settlement. Now they have a mechanism to challenge regulations.
The other thing they have is kind of a back door. They have a process where their stakeholders are consulted at the beginning and towards the end, while the regulation is being hatched. That means a regulatory body is being forced to, first of all, defend its rule. It has to do a cost-benefit analysis. It has to defend whether it has to legislate in the first place. It has to defend whether these rules are so-called science-based. Now, it might [Technical difficulty—Editor], but what it means is that we cannot use the precautionary principle, and therefore the burden is on the regulator to say, “This regulation will harm person X.” It's not on the company to say, “My product is safe.”
These are very important ways in which regulatory co-operation can affect how a regulation sees the light of day. The problem with that is that these are semi-transparent committees. Civil society does not have the same mechanisms or the same resources to sit on these committees and hatch the rules. This is an extra-parliamentary space. This is a space above our democracies where corporations from three countries actually have a say on our rules and have a dispute settlement mechanism if they don't like them.