Sure. To start with a bit of context, you mentioned the economic crisis and said that this was coming out of that. I think one of the driving forces we've had to help negotiate CETA—and I think this has cut across all governments—has been that we do have a very strong reliance on the U.S. market. Perhaps this is even more relevant now, but I think we do need to try to reduce that reliance, to some extent, by paying greater attention to other markets. The EU is a natural, because their values and their approaches are very similar to ours, and it's a large market of 500 million people.
There was this interest in diversification, which was an interest throughout the negotiations. We finished the agreement in principle in I think the fall of 2013. We finished the final text of the agreement a year later, in August of 2014, and then we had a very extended legal review of the text that took far longer than it usually takes, in large part because there were increasing concerns on the EU side about the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism.
The EU had been having particular difficulties with the U.S. on that question and had decided that they wanted to develop a new policy. When the Liberal government came into power, there was a strong desire on their part to also modernize the system of the investor-state dispute settlement. That took a while to negotiate out. We had some concerns about the EU proposal, so we did have a negotiation on the new improvements that we talked about.
That put us in a position where we could then sell CETA, not just because of that provision but because of the labour and environment elements and others, as a modern and progressive agreement, even more so than before. I think that helped to get it across the line at the end of the day.