On the independence point, there are a couple of gaps in the ICS. First, the members of the roster that was established still have a financial interest in the frequency of claims by foreign investors, so their remuneration is significantly dependent on one side bringing claims, which is not healthy for perceptions of independence in the process.
Second, they're not prohibited from working on the side as ISDS arbitrators under other treaties that allow for ISDS, some of which allow for entirely confidential ISDS proceedings. This means that even a disputing party before the ICS process has no way to reliably verify whether the roster member assigned to that party's case is working on the side or has worked on the side in a basically non-public arbitration process and has been paid lucratively in that context by an interested party. That's something that is easy to fix in the list of prohibited side activities, but for whatever reason was not in the CETA.
On fairness, there was a proposal in the original ICS proposal that the European Commission released in the context of the TTIP negotiations. About four months before the revised CETA text was made public, there was an article 23 that would have given a limited right of standing to third parties with an interest in the proceedings. That article, for reasons I'm not aware of, was removed from the CETA. From my point of view, someone, somewhere, consciously decided to keep ISDS unfair in its ICS iteration. That's a very precise failure of the ICS on the fairness point.
On domestic institutions and the duty to exhaust local remedies, CETA just doesn't incorporate that duty. It's a bit of a longer discussion as to why. It's the same thing with balance—