Okay, with investment commitments in FTAs as well as in bilateral investment treaties, that area does two things. The first thing is it includes obligations on countries with respect to how they treat foreign investments in their jurisdiction. For example, it imposes an obligation not to expropriate a foreign investment without timely and fair compensation. It imposes an obligation not to treat foreign investments less favourably than you treat domestic investors.
The second thing it does is it provides a unique dispute settlement mechanism. The entire TPP, and all of our FTAs, have a dispute settlement mechanism where one of the parties, a country, can bring a claim saying that the other country is not abiding by its obligations. You bring that to court, to an international dispute settlement system or arbitration, and the inquiry is on whether or not the treaty is being respected.
That exists also for the investment chapter. However, there is an additional mechanism that allows the investor—the private company, individual—to directly challenge the country on whether or not they are abiding by those obligations in the chapter. It's not about abiding by anything else in the treaty, not abiding by domestic law, but whether they are abiding by these four or five principles that are set out in the chapter.
That is where I think a lot of the concern lies, if you look carefully at the public discourse around that. There is a view that this is giving foreign investors a right of action against governments that can influence the government's regulatory decision-making and potentially have a chilling effect, or that those cases can be brought and a government's regulation can be found to contravene the obligations and therefore the investor can be awarded damages. That's the controversy—or the debate; let's put it that way—around the chapter.
In the TPP, we have an investment chapter and an investment dispute settlement system. We have sought to build on some of the experience in the NAFTA. It doesn't look like the NAFTA. It doesn't look like some of our bilateral FTAs. It doesn't look exactly like the CETA either.
Again, there are 12 countries at the table, so it's not going to look exactly the same. We have included additional transparency commitments, for example, clarifications to the right to regulate, procedural clarifications, a code of conduct for arbitrators, things like that, which don't exist in some of our other FTAs and bilaterals. In addition, there are other changes as well. The scope of ISDS in TPP is different from the NAFTA. It allows for investment claims to be brought under investment agreements. So where the dispute arises out of a contractual dispute it explicitly covers that, which is also different.
Every chapter is different.
I don't know if I've answered your question.