It is a hard argument, and you can't do it unless you look at the literature and the analysis and the modelling. It is coming from economists and others who are working under the assumption that we have reached the end of growth and who are looking at alternate models such as planned degrowth and co-operative localization, which are inhibited to some extent by trade agreements and by grassroots movements around the world. This has to be understood.
The other thing is that Peter Victor, an economist in Canada, I think at York, has done modelling showing that we can exist in this country totally within a domestic economy without really altering our services or our general well-being—not that we necessarily want that, but we may need to slow down growth. It may be that we don't need these mega-agreements, because they're putting us in a vulnerable position. For example, the U.S. has crafted these agreements. They decide who gets in on them, and then we get engulfed in their foreign policy. Part of the TPP is the Asia “pivot”, which is the foreign policy that the U.S. has adopted to isolate China.
So there's a lot more to this. A lot of people say it's not as much about trade as it is about the other aspects, and they say it's an initiative for more global control beyond our borders.