We too feel that the UN principles that have been developed over several years now by a range of UN human rights experts.... These experts aren't necessarily focused on trade—because it's come up through the UN human rights system, not through trade bodies—but have had opportunities to really study the impacts on human rights of what's in, or sometimes what's not in, trade deals, including the right to health or equality rights of women, or a whole range of other human rights concerns. That is what we have repeatedly recommended the government use as the framework to develop a robust human rights impact assessment process going forward.
We would be a bit of a world leader here. We wouldn't be the only government that's out there. The European Union is doing more and more around the human rights impact of their trade deals—but we certainly would be leading. I think that's where we often hope and expect to see Canada when it comes to global human rights issues, that we're not waiting for the pack to get ahead of us and then catching up, but that we want to be creating best practice and developing new models.