I think at the end of the day, the dispute settlement mechanisms in international trade law do not work in the same way that the dispute settlement mechanism does in domestic law.
I know you have litigated cases in the past as a lawyer, and I did motions 30 years ago, when I was starting. In a domestic court, you have a judge and the judge decides, and that's it, right? You can appeal, but there are no situations of a policy not being applied because there's a lack of political will, etc. It's very difficult, though it also exists a bit.
I think the world right now is unfortunately going, in general, in the direction of not applying the rules. Even the United States, as I mentioned, has had decisions that were made against it over the last year, and they are just not following through. That's something we're always going to have to deal with. However, I think what you try to do is institutionalize your dispute as much as possible, to give you something to hang your argument on that can maybe help overcome a certain amount of political resistance.
With regard to my Latin American experience in investment disputes, my last job was with a gold mining company in Mexico for seven years. In the past few years, there have been several investment disputes in which the companies in question have obtained arbitral awards. That's for a lot more money than your average trade dispute. In a big trade dispute, an arbitral award can be something that forces the local government to stick to their national commitments.
On specific trade agreements, I would say that the CETA appears to be the best, because it creates all of these regulatory co-operation mechanisms. It's a long, hard slog to get through those regulatory co-operation mechanisms, but frankly, we're talking about a group of advanced industrialized democracies that are much more willing than countries in a lot of the world to talk through these issues with us. The CETA, I would say, is top of class, but it's still early days. It takes a long time for these things to play out.