International Trade committee  Yes, that's right.

International Trade committee  There are about five lawyers on staff.

International Trade committee  I'm going to address your first point first, saying that it's not going to be a problem for challenging our sovereign action on the environment. I mentioned the Clayton-Bilcon case. That's one example but we've also seen other ISDS cases—

International Trade committee  I didn't make that point, and I agree it's reciprocal so I didn't say that. What I'm saying is that we've seen other examples of particular changes in policy being challenged. For instance, in Germany they decided to turn away from nuclear power and that was challenged under ISD

International Trade committee  The first thing to point out, as you were mentioning, is “to which” they are “a party”, right? It's not providing any new standards. It's not requiring the parties of this agreement to meet any standard that they haven't already signed on to.

International Trade committee  I think the Paris agreement and any climate change action is going to be watered down, based on ISDS and based on other parts of this trade agreement, which would would put in place barriers to taking strong climate action here in Canada. It's not necessarily this section that's

International Trade committee  The way that ISDS has worked in the past—and will work again under the TPP—is that private tribunals looking at these issues are interpreting provisions in a way that gives very broad access to companies to sue the Canadian government. We've been, under NAFTA anyway, the most sue

International Trade committee  The first main issue is the language. It's weak, and it provides a lot of discretion. I'll give you an example. In article 20.5 it talks about the protection of the ozone layer. What the chapter does is use words like “recognizing that emissions of certain substances can signifi

International Trade committee  This is going to be a barrier to taking strong action on climate change. What provisions like the ISDS provisions put in place is an assumption the status quo is working. We know for something like climate change it's not. If we take strong action, which we need to and we're comm

International Trade committee  In terms of the timing, I don't have an opinion on why that is, but I think this means we have the opportunity to take a look per chapter at what this is going to mean. For something like the environment, we need to go through it line by line, see what's protected, and notice how

International Trade committee  My name is Jacqueline Wilson. I'm a lawyer with the Canadian Environmental Law Association. We are an Ontario legal aid clinic specializing in environmental law and policy, and we have a long history of analysis of the environmental implications of trade agreements. I'm going to

International Trade committee  The citizen complaint provisions are also quite weak. Again, only a person of a party can challenge its own government's implementation, it is only by written submissions, and the TPP party is only required to respond “in a timely manner”. Once that response takes place, there's