Thank you for the question.
The investment court system, I think most experts who've looked at it would agree, is not actually a court. It is another form of investor-state dispute settlement.
It does, as I mentioned earlier, make some procedural improvements around issues such as having a fixed roster and trying to deal with the issue of conflict of interest, but it doesn't deal with it completely, as you will hear in future testimony. There's still a built-in incentive to find in favour of investors at least some of the time, because it's still a pay-as-you-go system. The arbitrators are not salaried nor are they denied the ability to, in future, work for litigants in investor-state dispute-settlement cases.
So there are some procedural improvements, but on the substantive side, it's very much like the traditional investment-protection agreements like NAFTA, which Canada hasn't been sued under. In certain circumstances, for example, on the fair and equitable treatment provision, there is language in CETA that, I would argue, even goes beyond the minimum standards protection provisions of NAFTA, which have been among the most abused provisions. They can be used to challenge, as I said, non-discriminatory regulation like an environmental assessment or like a moratorium on wind farms.
CETA has language that allows arbitrators to take into account, when they're interpreting these absolute standards of protection, things such as whether a government policy is manifestly arbitrary or whether the government, through a specific representation, has created a legitimate expectation that was subsequently frustrated. That line of argumentation is one that has been exploited and abused by investors both under NAFTA and in other agreements. It's quite a concern.