Okay, and thank you.
Well, it's not a carve-out in a legal sense. It's an exclusion, and it's a voluntary exclusion. If the TPP is ratified and enters into force, countries can voluntarily exclude all of their tobacco control measures from an investor-state dispute. That's written into the ISDS, so they can do that voluntarily. But it doesn't prevent a state-to-state dispute settlement or a panel from being created. If there's a tobacco transnational that sort of lobbies one of the TPP countries somewhere and says it's going to object to a tobacco control measure, let's say in Canada, maybe perhaps with plain packaging, it could still initiate a dispute under the state-to-state dispute provisions of the TPP. So it's not a full carve-out.
As well, tobacco transnationals can shop around and try to find a different investment treaty to which Canada might be a party and could still try to launch a dispute under that investment treaty. The TPP does not exclude potential suits. I think the significance of it is a recognition when the TPP was being negotiated—highlighted because of the problems that were happening with Australia's plain packaging at the time and with Uruguay with some of the challenges it's been facing—that these investor-state dispute chapters actually oppose challenges or regulatory chill around tobacco control measures.
Our concern extends beyond that, because you have obesogenic food items, alcohol, sugar, and other globally traded commodities that we know increasingly are posing long-term health risks. Our question was that, if it was important enough to try to allow or create and send a signal about a tobacco control exemption under investor-state dispute, why was that not extended to all non-discriminatory public health measures that were intended to essentially deal with the problems we face now, but also to anticipate the problems we're going to be facing down the road?