International Trade committee  The point I was trying to make briefly in my presentation was that Canadian companies don't need this to make investments. The only things stopping Canadian companies from investing in Ukraine right now are war, mines and uncertainty about where the borders are going to be drawn after this all settles.

International Trade committee  It's a system available exclusively to foreign investors. Some people call it a justice bubble. It allows foreign investors going into a host country to bring with them a series of standards for the treatment of investors, taken mainly from U.S. and U.K. law, and then apply those outside of the courts and have arbitral panels decide for them.

International Trade committee  I can't disagree with that statement, that it's in every country's interest to increase its energy independence. I can't disagree with you on that one.

International Trade committee  Thank you for that question. I don't know the answer. Canadian trade agreements usually don't include a lot on energy—energy policy and energy security—outside of, say, the North American context, where there's a more integrated energy market. Why they wouldn't talk about it specifically....

International Trade committee  Thanks very much to the chair and to the committee for the invitation to be here. It's my privilege to be here to speak about this important agreement. I'm going to make only one recommendation today, which is that the committee should advise the government to remove the treaty's investor-state dispute settlement process from chapter 17.

International Trade committee  It's case by case, I'm assuming. In some instances, it does make a lot of sense to go through the WTO. I mentioned the notice process of the technical barriers to trade committee. Frequently countries will band together when there's a measure introduced somewhere else that they don't like—exporters in common, for example—but in some cases it makes a lot of sense to do it bilaterally.

International Trade committee  Thank you for your question. I don't know the answer to that question either. You have a bunch of answers, and they all sound like they could make sense. Just to reiterate, there are consumer preferences involved here as well. The Europeans know what kind of beef they like and don't like and the production methods they like and don't like.

International Trade committee  In keeping with the spirit of my presentation, I would just say that I can't think of one worst or most important NTB that Canada should be focused on right now. I think they all relate to very specific contexts and very specific sectors, and they should be dealt with that way.

International Trade committee  Thank you for your questions. I'll try to answer as well as I can. I think you raised some very important questions about what the government's intentions were in the negotiations. What was the strategy? Was it appropriate? Did we get an outcome that we maybe didn't anticipate?

International Trade committee  Thanks very much, Chair and committee, for the invitation to be here. To be honest, I wasn't exactly sure how to frame my presentation on the topic of non-tariff barriers. It seemed to me to be quite a broad category. I thought, maybe given the high profile of certain food issues around non-tariff barriers, that would be the focus, but from looking at the group you have here, it's more eclectic and more varied than that.

International Trade committee  Yes. It just pertains, again, to traceability, I suppose, and maybe in respect to human rights abuses and forced labour in supply chains. We might want to protect Canadian industry and farming from those kinds of practices overseas, as the Biden administration is doing with its emphasis on how that undercuts the competitiveness of the U.S. manufacturing and U.S. industry.

International Trade committee  Was that the news that it wants to join the CPTPP and not the separate Biden administration-led process?

International Trade committee  Well, I suppose for Canada, it wouldn't have a huge impact, because we have a free trade agreement with South Korea. I can't speak to the motives of the current South Korean government as to why it would do this. I know that the previous government wasn't as interested as the current government is, so maybe it's a shift in direction based on the election.

International Trade committee  Absolutely.

International Trade committee  That's an interesting question. Not within the ISDS chapter—