I should start by noting that while it will be new to NAFTA, it's unlikely to be new to Canada and the United States. I think the expectation is that the blueprint being used is the e-commerce chapter that was included in the trans-Pacific partnership, the TPP.
We have a pretty good sense of the kinds of issues that are out there. In fact, U.S. officials have highlighted the e-commerce chapter as one of their priorities. They foresee updating NAFTA to include some of these digital issues. To the extent to which they're representing, let's say, large Silicon Valley companies that have set up very large, cloud-based servers, they want to ensure that data flows freely to the United States and can be actively stored in the United States.
One thing we have seen take place over the last number of years, especially as people become more aware of some of the privacy implications and surveillance activities that take place around the world, is that more and more Canadians, more and more Europeans in Europe, and people in other jurisdictions are anxious to ensure that their data resides locally within the country and that it is subject to their own local or national laws.
In fact, both British Columbia and Nova Scotia have set up, for certain kinds of information, laws that require that information to be stored within the province. Also, the EU, as you may know, has become increasingly aggressive about limiting disclosure across borders outside the EU unless the country it goes to has strong privacy protections.
The danger we face is really two-fold, one aspect being the prospect that this chapter might limit our ability to say that we want to ensure at least in certain circumstances that Canadians' information is subject to Canadian privacy law and may be required to be retained locally in some circumstances. Also, we run the risk that if there is a data transfer provision that says you can't put up any restrictions on transferring between borders, we could on the one hand have NAFTA say “no restrictions” and the EU on the other hand say that if you want to continue to transfer data between Canada and the EU member states you must have some restrictions, because you can't allow that same data to, let's say, leak down to the United States.
That puts us between the proverbial rock and a hard place, whereby we have one major trading bloc saying no restrictions and another saying that you have to have some restrictions in order to trade.