Thank you.
Yes, globally you've mentioned that many countries in the world now are starting to look to renegotiate their investor state agreements, their BITs—their bilaterals—and their free trade agreements that have this chapter in them, and that's for obvious reasons. What we found is that many of them signed onto these with very little understanding. The developed world came in and it looked good. Once all of these cases started to emerge, they had second thoughts, and so that's going on.
What we're finding in Canada is that a high number of these cases are attacking our environment legislation or health, and people are concerned that our legislation, which has been democratically put in place, is being unfairly challenged by an offshore court before using our own domestic court. We find that this offshore investor state tribunal is not at all like a public court. It's made up of three people who are trade lawyers, and they're not paid a regular salary. In other words, they're not on a permanent court and have no tenure. They don't even have a permanent base of knowledge. They don't have a permanent location. They come into a hotel room, often, and stick a sign up as to which base they're with.
The other thing about it is that the protections that the corporate sector is offered—things like national treatment and expropriation—because of that lack of a permanent base of knowledge and because of what some people consider a bit of bias with the international trade lawyers, are often based on decisions that are made in a more arbitrary way.
I noticed that when I started to examine what happened with the Digby Neck quarry case, which I participated in for the early stages and which was not permitted by the joint panel. Then a case was brought back by Bilcon, the company, and that's still going on. The federal government is trying to have that whole thing set aside because it was so unfairly judged. It was determined that it should have been a domestic court that examined this particular issue that came up—