 Again, my name is Hadrian Merchants Kirkwood. I'm a senior researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which is the national office of which is located in Ottawa on the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin and Anishinaabic people. So thank you to them for allowing us to use this land. And welcome everyone to the latest chapter in the webinar series with everything up for grabs, the Green New Deal's The World Needs Now, which is being put on by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, both the Brussels and New York offices, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and the Institute for Policy Studies. So it's been a real collaborative effort and it's been a fantastic series so far. We're really looking forward to continuing that momentum today. And a lot of what we're talking about today builds on the webinar we had two weeks ago. I would also like to begin before we get into more of the details to acknowledge and commend the anti-racist and anti-fascist activism that's taking place in the United States right now in response to the murder of George Floyd and the epidemic of police violence in the US. I'd also like to point out that there are solidarity actions occurring around the world. This is not just a US issue. And although this past week has been difficult, of course, it's a very important reminder to us in the climate justice movement that climate justice is racial justice. And fighting oppression is a central to a Green New Deal, as is reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And those of us working on environmental issues need to be active, anti-racist, anti-fascist climate fighters. It is all part of the same thing. So let's keep that in mind as we move forward today. The specific title of our webinar today is Confronting the Free Trade Model, Trade Treaties, Energy, and Green New Deals. And we're going to explore the ways in which the current trade and investment regime interferes with the Green New Deal vision of a broad social and economic transformation to address the joint crises of climate change and inequality. And again, what we're talking about today is building on some of the previous webinars in this series. Two weeks ago, we talked at a very high level about the sort of free trade model. Today, we're going to be talking in a bit more detail about specific barriers and strategies for overcoming them in the context of free trade and a Green New Deal. We'll be doing that looking at some specific examples of renewable energy disputes under the World Trade Organization, as well as investment disputes under the Energy Charter Treaty. And we're also going to talk about ways to begin to overcome some of these obstacles in part through a reflection on how the COVID crisis has sort of changed the realm of political possibility. So we'll be talking about all of that in this session. Of course, it's not just me here. I'm joined by two fantastic guests and experts in the field. The first of which is Pia Eberhardt. She is a researcher and campaigner with the Brussels-based Lobby Watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory. She's based in Berlin and has worked extensively on a specific aspect of international trade and investment agreements. That is the extreme privileges granted to foreign investors known under the acronym ISDS. Of course, her expertise goes beyond ISDS, but that will be one of our focuses today. And Scott Sinclair, my colleague at the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, he's a senior researcher and director of the Trade and Investment Research Project. He's written widely on trade policy issues and specializing in the impacts on public services and regulation. And he is based in Prince Edward Island in Canada. So the way it's going to work is we're going to do three rounds of discussion, and then we'll open things up to audience questions. So the first round is going to be about renewable energy and free trade agreements. The second round is going to be about how we work around, how we begin to work around the constraints imposed on us by free trade agreements. And then the third is going to be a discussion about how the context has changed because of COVID and what lessons can we learn for a Green New Deal and for reforming the free trade regime from the response we've seen to COVID in the past few months. So those are the three topics we're going to address at first, but we'd really encourage you to submit your questions because a big part of this webinar is going to be addressing your questions, talking about the issues you want us to talk about. So please do feel free to ask your questions in the Zoom chat box at any time. I'd also say please do tell us where you're from. It's great to know who's joining us, and I see there's a lot of people already in the chat box saying where they're from. We have people from all over the world already joining us. But yeah, again, just throw your questions in there as they come up and our moderator Erin behind the scenes is going to be pulling those together, and we'll do our very best to answer as many of your questions as we can in the time we have today. So I think that's all the kind of housekeeping stuff out of the way. Before we turn things over to Pia and Scott, I'd like to just provide a little bit of context for the issues we're talking about today. And the first is just what is a Green New Deal? Those of you who fall long in the webinar or I'm sure most people watching today are familiar with the Green New Deal, but just so we're all on the same page. What we're talking about here is a broad project of social and economic transformation to address the joint crises of climate change and inequality. It sees those two crises as intertwined and inextricable, and therefore they need to be addressed together. It involves both grassroots movements, but also top-down policy change. This is, again, a very comprehensive idea. And one of the key political messages here is that there are tangible benefits for working people, for communities, things like good jobs, enhanced social security, accessible education, universal health care, and so on and so on that are all part of this project of reducing emissions. So although, of course, the environmental goals are essential, they're not always front of mind in the Green New Deal. We do see these things as holistic and comprehensive. Now specifically, there are a few areas of a Green New Deal that I want to highlight. So this is not everything in a Green New Deal, but a few areas that are really relevant to our conversation today because these are policy areas that are implicated in free trade agreements. So the first is the idea of decarbonization, which is reducing or eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from our economy. That's going to require things like regulating fossil fuel projects, strengthening regulations like carbon pricing and so on. There's the issue of environmental reclamation. So this is things reclaiming mines, expanding parks and protected areas, expanded public ownership that could involve creating new public utilities or bringing privatized utilities back under public control, and similarly, the expansion of public services, things like pharmacare, for example, or home insurance, as well as bringing privatized services back under public control, things like water and waste management, which has been privatized in much of the world. Job creation is a big piece of a Green New Deal, whether that's through something like a jobs guarantee, investment in training, or even something like a basic income. And then there's also the idea of sustainable procurement, using government funds directly to support inclusive and green growth. And I mentioned these specific areas of a Green New Deal. Again, not exhaustive, there are other parts of a Green New Deal that are worth talking about, but these particular areas are very vulnerable in the context of free trade agreements. And that's something that we should keep in mind. In general, and we're going to get into this in more detail today, some of the barriers that FTAs present to Green New Deal style policies are, well, first of all, the kind of fundamental compatibility with the ideologies. The idea of free trade agreements is that we have this neoliberal free market imperative, and that just doesn't work with the idea of managing and directing the economy towards pro-social goals. Specifically, there's the issue of investor-state dispute settlement. Pia and Scott will talk a bit more about that, which allows corporations to directly challenge governments for public interest regulations. And we see the grounds for challenging are broad and sometimes continue to get broader, so corporations can challenge governments on the grounds of expropriation, national treatment, performance requirements, most favorite nation. These are all familiar phrases for trade policy folks, but the point is that there's a lot of different ways that governments can be challenged for taking measures in the public interest. Putting corporations aside, we also have the issue of state-to-state challenges. So governments can challenge each other over things like local preferences, and Scott's going to discuss an example of that soon. Intellectual property rules present a barrier because they can inhibit the transfer of essential technologies, and of course we need to be getting new and cutting-edge green technologies to, especially developing countries, but every country needs access to these new technologies to decarbonize. And then there's the general problem of a free trade model that encourages us to ship goods to every corner of the world, just facilitates emissions as an integral part of the supply chain, and there's no way to get around increasing trade volumes without increasing emissions. So there's a wide variety of barriers that FTAs present to the idea of a green new deal, and we're going to dive into those in a bit more detail. I would just like to mention one more time. Do please throw your questions in the chat as we go. I'll mention that you have the option in the chat to send a message to all panelists, so that's something that we will see here, which is great, but if you want the other attendees to see your message as well, make sure you send the message to all panelists and all attendees so that everyone can see your comments. So you have the choice there, whether it's send it just to us, or whether you want to send it to everybody who's watching today. Okay, so that's been me talking for a long time here, so I think we should turn things over to our experts, Pia and Scott. And we're going to start with our first round of discussion here, and that's about renewable energy and free trade agreements. So I'd like our guests to tell us about how trade agreements and investment treaties have been used to challenge what would otherwise appear to be very promising national renewable energy policies. So things that might have created local benefits from clean energy production, or that would support the just transition away from polluting carbon-based energy. Scott, why don't we start with you? Okay, thank you very much, Adrienne. And it's a real pleasure to be participating in this webinar. Thank you to the other presenters, the translators, of course, and the organizers, and welcome to everyone who's joined us. Before I try to answer the first question from Adrienne, I want to acknowledge that the land where I'm speaking from today is the traditional and unceded territory of the Abiguit-McMaw First Nation. And Canada likes to refer to itself as a trading nation, but it's important to acknowledge that a lot of what we have traded in the past and much of our current economy depends on the disposition of this continent's first inhabitants. A just transition that does not account for and reverse this fact is not one worth pursuing. Which brings us to the question of how current trade and investment trees post serious, but not insurmountable, obstacles to achieving that kind of transition and other divisions embodied in the Green New Deal. We should begin with the World Trade Organization, or WTO, whose rules still provide the basic framework governing global commerce. When the WTO was established in 1995, it incorporated and greatly expanded on the previous general agreement on tariffs and trade, or GATT. Many non-trade or only marginally trade related areas were constrained by the WTO, including intellectual property rights, services, and the setting of health and safety standards. Importantly, the WTO also created a binding dispute settlement mechanism, which has been used mainly by powerful countries to enforce favorable rulings through punitive trade sanctions. These changes in the mid-1990s were agreed to by rich countries and global corporations negotiating a secret, and then presented to smaller countries as a feta-complee. Later, as the impact of the new rules became more widely understood by developing countries and civil society, they generated controversy and protests, leading up to the Seattle ministerial meetings in 1999. Today, these provisions are just as problematic from the perspective of addressing the climate emergency through a global green new deal or deals. Intellectual property rules establish inflexible 20-year monopolies on patented products and processes. When what is needed is the rapid transfer of renewable energy and other climate-friendly technologies around the globe. Trade and services obligations discourage the creation of public services and state enterprises. When what is needed is a massive boost in public services, public investment, and public ownership. WTO services rules are designed to keep committed sectors permanently open to foreign service competition. They disallow single-service providers, even if that single provider is the public sector. WTO rules on standards discourage distinguishing between products based on how they were made, which makes it harder for public policies to favor low-carbon products and industries over polluting carbon-intensive ones. In fact, the WTO is better understood as a comprehensive system for protecting private property rights from state or democratic interference, rather than simply as a tool for keeping trade flowing. The WTO's role in frustrating locally-based renewable energy initiatives illustrates this basic conflict. There has been a flurry of WTO challenges against government support for renewable energy. Since 2010, there have been eight complaints against subsidies, local content requirements, and other state supports for renewable energy. These disputes are occurring despite warnings from climate scientists that we have less than a decade to drastically cut global emissions to meet the agreed target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Three cases have already been decided by the WTO dispute summit body. In each, local benefit measures were found to violate WTO rules. In 2009, the Canadian Province of Ontario introduced the Green Energy Act, that can fairly be described as Canada's first Green New Deal policy. It offered generous incentives for renewable energy, but to access those benefits, a high percentage of the solar and wind technology had to be made in Ontario. Four years after this policy came into force, it was struck down by a World Trade Organization dispute summit panel after challenges from the European Union and Japan. The WTO ruled that the local content requirements attached to Ontario's incentives for renewables were illegal, dealing an unfortunate blow to the landmark climate and green jobs strategy. The province responded by removing domestic content requirements and later killed the legislation, which was coming under heavy attack from opposition parties and right-wing think tanks. In 2013, the US went to the WTO to challenge an Indian national government program that offered long-term contracts for solar power at guaranteed rates on the condition that the solar power developers use a certain percentage of panels and equipment manufactured in India. After the US won its case in 2016, the Indian government promptly launched its own challenge to similar provisions employed by US states. Similarly, after China's solar incentives were attacked by the US government at the WTO, the Chinese government filed a complaint against solar production incentives in Washington State, Connecticut, Montana, California, Michigan, and Delaware, which were all designed to encourage local job creation. In late 2019, the WTO ruled in favor of China, but an appeal has yet to be heard. This destructive cycle of lawsuits, countersuits, and retaliation over incentives to scale up the local production of renewable energy is hard to believe, especially during a climate emergency. Meanwhile, there's never been a single WTO dispute over subsidies to the fossil fuel industries, which are far, far larger. Clearly, these are major failings in our international trade and investment system. They suggest our countries or governments are more concerned with Midlet's adherence to free trade dogma than to real solutions to climate change and sustainable trade. In the face of a climate emergency WTO litigation and the chilling effect it exerts on climate action must end. A little later in this webinar, we will discuss some strategies for addressing these problems, but for now, I'll turn it back to Hadrian and Pia. Thank you. Thanks very much, Scott. Pia, I'll turn it to you now to ask the same thing. Can you maybe tell us a bit about how trade agreements and investment treaties have been used to challenge what otherwise seemed like promising national renewable energy policies? Yes, thank you, Hadrian, and thank you also for the organizers, to the organizers for inviting me and hello to all the participants. It's great to see such a large number. What I will talk about is specifically the regime of investor-state dispute settlement and the Energy Charter Treaty and how they have been used, particularly against government action to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Hadrian, you already explained a little bit about ISDS. I guess many people on this webinar know the regime. It basically allows companies to sue states outside of their courts in private tribunals, where you have three private lawyers who then decide whether the far-reaching rights of foreign investors in investment treaties have been violated. And if they come to that conclusion, they can ask the state to pay a lot of money in compensation to the investor, money that very often wouldn't be available under national courts, or European courts, at least not in that amount. And companies have indeed used this regime to challenge climate action by governments, and in particular decisions to face alcohol, to limit drilling of new oil and gas. And I wanted to give two examples from Europe. These are cases that have been filed under the Energy Charter Treaty. The Energy Charter Treaty is one of many thousands of agreements around the world that allow investors these rights. It is interesting because it binds many countries more than 50 from Western and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, mostly. And the first example I want to give is a case against Italy that is ongoing since 2017. Italy has been sued by a UK company, Rockoppa, an oil company. Why is that so? The reason is that the Italian parliament banned any new oil and gas drilling in a certain distance from the Italian coast. The rationale at the time was not so much a climate rationale. It was more a reaction to a decade of protests from the region, mainly raising environmental concerns about the drilling and also economic concerns around the local fishery and tourism industry. But the effect was that there was no more new oil and gas drilling. And Rockoppa is now challenging that decision. It is claiming up to 350 US dollars in compensation. That interestingly is seven times more than the money that the company actually spent for exploration, studies, etc. As I said, the case is ongoing. But if Italy loses, it could have a chilling effect for other countries who decide to keep fossil fuels in the ground. A second example is also from the Energy Charter Treaty. It is very recent. It is a claim that is not yet there, but that is actively threatened by a German company, Unipa, which interestingly enough is owned by a state-owned company from Finland. And Unipa and its owner Fortum are threatening to sue the Netherlands because last year the Dutch parliament decided to say no more burning of coal for electricity by 2030. So that's the Dutch coal phase out. We know that in December, Unipa took the first step to actually sue the Netherlands. They are now discussing the two parties, the Netherlands and the company, to try to find a solution. But if that is not found, then the claim could come and it could be up to a billion euros claim. There are other examples from around the world. I just briefly mentioned two that many of the people on this webinar will know. One is a case that a Canadian company launched against the US over the very controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which was stopped by the former US President Obama. And that stop was challenged in an arbitration court under NAFTA. The company withdrew the claim once President Trump allowed the pipeline. But at the time, experts agreed that the company would have had a good chance of winning the case. It was super expensive, a staggering US $15 billion, I think that's what they were asking. And similarly, Canada has been challenged or is being challenged since last year by a US company, a coal company who is not happy with a decision by the province of Alberta, who basically decided the same thing than the Netherlands to stop the burning of coal for electricity by 2030. So these are four cases that are very clear, I would say climate cases, and show how the regime can be used by polluters to basically get us compensation when governments do the right thing, namely make decisions to keep fossil fuels in the ground. And experts have one for several years that this is just the tip of the iceberg that there might be more cases we don't even know of, and more will be coming. And just when I end, just to underline, why are these cases such a big problem? I think there's two reasons. One is the fact that they can become very expensive, more expensive than any challenge that could hit a government in national courts or under European law, for example. There are many reasons for that. One reason is that it is very common for companies in this regime to demand compensation, not just for the money that they actually spent on a project actually invested, but the money that they could have made had a pipeline been approved, had a new oil drilling rig been approved and drilled oil for 10, 20, 30 years. So you can imagine how big the money, how big the sums can be if a tribunal says, yes, you are right, you shouldn't have been stopped and you should be compensated for these expected future profits as well. And because the regime can be so expensive, and this is the second reason why it's so dangerous for climate action, there is a very high incentive for governments to actually not go down the path of ambitious climate action when they are sued or when there is a threat of such an expensive lawsuit. Governments also have to keep an eye on taxpayer interests, and because ISDS can be so expensive and so unpredictable, they are well advised to take these threats seriously, which is why the risk that this regime creates a regulatory chill on climate action around the world is particularly high. So I would basically conclude a bit like Scott, I think in times of a climate crisis, there should be absolutely no space for the threat of such lawsuits and for actual lawsuits. So this is why is one of many reasons why ISDS has to go. Great. Thank you very much, Pia. I will note that we're now over 100 participants, so it's really great to see so much enthusiasm for the topic. Just a few housekeeping notes if you joined us late. First of all, there is a live interpretation into Spanish available. Just click on the globe at the bottom of your Zoom window and you can choose which language to listen in. So if you'd like to listen in Spanish, you can otherwise leave it as English or off. Please do join the chat. So if you click on the chat button, you can speak to us as panelists or to everyone who's viewing the webinar. Just make sure you choose who you want to send it to. So by default, your messages only go to the panelists and you can click that drop the menu and select all panelists and attendees and then everyone will see your message. So feel free to select that and then introduce yourself to those everyone else who's watching. And we'd also really like to encourage you to submit some questions. So there is next to the chat button on your Zoom window, there is a Q&A button. If you click on there, you can submit some questions for us and we'll do our best to answer all your questions in just a few minutes once we've gotten through a few more rounds of discussion. On that note, this was a we kind of had a pretty dour first round there with Pia and Scott explaining a lot of the problems that FDA's present for the idea of a Green New Deal. So maybe let's talk about how we start working around some of these constraints because of course we can't just wait for trade reform before we start acting on a Green New Deal. So my question to the two of you is are there, first of all, are there short-term strategies that we can take and governments can take to work around the trade and investment treaty obstacles that you've both described? And then thinking longer term, how can we change or what would we do with the multilateral system so that it can better support the transition to adjust and decarbonized global economy? Pia, why don't we start with you? Sure. I mean, actually, governments are already working around, so I'll continue talking about ISDS issues I spoke about before. So governments are already trying to design climate policies in a way that they cannot be sued. I spoke about this example of the Dutch coal phase out, which is challenged by a German coal company. And the Netherlands was very well, very aware of the risk of ISDS suits. We know that from internal documents. And what they did is they say, well, let's just go for a very long period that the coal companies can continue polluting and only ban the burning of coal for electricity by 2030. It's quite a long period of ongoing emissions in times of a climate crisis. And the government said, well, maybe that limits the risk of being sued. So governments are trying to find ways around to mitigate the risk. But obviously, that's not the strategies we want. There are other actions that could be taken that are discussed and are increasingly discussed at the moment because there is also a high risk of ISDS suits against governments that act to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. So this is why these reform proposals or changes to get a bit of attention at the moment for the area of climate change, one solution or one part of a solution could be that in any future international climate agreement, you include a little paragraph saying everything we do to protect the climate cannot be challenged under any ISDS treaty around the world. There have been proposals made before the Paris Agreement was signed to include such a paragraph that was not included back then. But who knows, maybe it's an opportunity for the next climate negotiations. So that would be one way. Another way would be to say, okay, we have these thousands of treaties. They present a problem. We write up a new international agreement, a multilateral instrument where we basically say the same. So outside of an international climate treaty, basically saying no challenges against climate action under trade and investment treaties. So these are measures that could be taken. Obviously, it's a question of political will and the question of public pressure. Maybe a last one, and that is an option that governments have already taken, is basically to get out of the treaties, to terminate them bilaterally as one country, to terminate them with the agreement of the trading partner, or again to sign another agreement where you basically wipe out these treaties in one go or a large number of it. It sounds radical, but it's actually not, because it's steps that countries have taken around the world in the last year. Just very recently, 23 EU governments said, we want to terminate the treaties amongst us, because they have been found to violate EU law. So they just wrote up a treaty and did it. So it is where possible. Unfortunately, it's not yet, I would say the main trend, because we do see governments around the world negotiating new treaties that give more or less the same power to corporations. And the Energy Charter Treaty, which I mentioned, is being expanded to the global south. So unfortunately, we also do have another trend of getting us deeper into the mess and making it more difficult for governments to act on the climate. So I would say it's still a lot of work to do for us. Yeah. I would highlight, speaking of governments that have moved in that direction, the recently renegotiated NAFTA agreement, the Canada, US, whatever, QSMA, USMCA, did in large part restrict and in part eliminate ISDS. So maybe for questionable motives in that case, but the fact is that some important governments have established that precedent that we can actually eliminate or reform ISDS. It's not impossible to do that. Scott, I'm going to turn it to the same question. We can't wait necessarily for long-term reform, although I'd like to hear your thoughts on what the long-term should look like. And are there short-term strategies that governments can take to work around some of the constraints you've mentioned? Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Hadrian. Thank you, Pia. Yeah. I mean, it's crucial that we protect climate action from trade and investment treaty challenges and that we don't let the obstacles that we're discussing today in any way discourage us or get us to reduce pressure on our governments to take decisive action, which is clearly needed. Now, I would suggest that we could use a peace clause to stop the escalating trade wars where countries are challenging each other over public policies to promote green energy or other climate-friendly initiatives. So the goal would be to negotiate a global moratorium on climate-related trade disputes. Peace clauses have been used before at the WTO, certain aspects of intellectual prop trips, intellectual property rights implementation. They've been used in the agriculture sector. So it's not unprecedented, but again, it would be time-consuming to negotiate such a clause. But I would suggest that individual countries could act immediately and on their own by valuing not to initiate any environment-related disputes and withdrawing support for investment challenges initiated by domestic firms against other countries. There's a silver lining here to the current impasse at the WTO where the appellate body has stopped meeting because of the U.S. administration's refusal to approve the appointment of new judges. As discussed earlier, late last year, a WTO panel ruled against a range of U.S. stake on renewable energy incentives and job creation programs. That was the dispute brought by the Chinese government. But as long as the WTO appeal system is stalled, the dispute remains in limbo. Now, other member governments facing similar challenges could also choose to appeal adverse rulings into the void, as they say in Geneva, which would buy precious time in the fight against climate change. In the longer term, to effectively address global warming, we will need new international trade rules and new approaches to intellectual property, services, government procurement, and product standards. Monopoly patent rights should be eliminated from trade agreements, leaving the regulation of intellectual property to national governments and international organizations that are better equipped to balance commercial and public interests. Until this goal can be achieved, progressive governments should take full advantage of the flexibilities that exist under the current rules. What are the most important of these flexibilities is compulsory licensing, which could speed up the transfer and development of promising renewable energy and other climate-friendly technologies around the world. Compulsory license is basically the suspension of patent rights, payment of royalty, payment of royalty to the holder of those intellectual property rights, and making the technology, whether it's for medicine or for renewable energy or some conservation process, freely available upon payment of royalty to everyone. New rules must also let governments use public purchasing at all levels, local, provincial, federal, state, to encourage sustainable development and favor local employment in order to create green jobs and support the local economy. In each of the three renewable energy cases I discussed earlier, the WTO dispute settlement body rejected the defendant's sensible arguments that their programs were part of government procurement, which is actually exempted from the WTO's national treatment or nondiscrimination rules. The overly strict interpretation of WTO rules needs to end when it comes to government efforts to address the climate emergency. What we need is a more holistic view where commercial rights are subordinate to human rights and the help of the planet. And as has been mentioned by all of us, public services must be fully protected by excluding them completely in all new and existing trade and investment agreements. Only by shielding public services from trade challenges will we ensure that all levels of government can create new public services, expand existing ones, and reverse privatizations without facing penalties under trade and investment treaties. And finally, as we've heard previously in this webinar series and again from Pia today, we need an ironclad exclusion for climate-related measures which should be included in new and existing trade agreements and, as Pia said, in the next iteration of a global climate pact. The primacy of climate action over trade and investment treaty rights should be clearly established. Very much, Scott. We're going to get into one more round of our discussion before we open things up to your questions. I do see lots of questions coming in into the chat window. It'd be really helpful for us if you could also put your questions in the Q&A box. So at the bottom of your screen next to where it says chat, if you click on Q&A, you can actually put in questions and that'll be helpful for us for organizing them, but we'll also do our best to pull out your questions that you've written into the chat. And we'll get to that shortly. We're going to do one more round of discussion and we're going to back off for a second from some of the specifics of the free trade regime and talk a bit more about the kind of political moment we find ourselves in. And specifically, I'm referring to the COVID response that countries around the world are undertaking. And I'm interested in talking about what lessons we can pull from that response in the context of a Green New Deal and potentially for trade reform. So maybe I'll kick things off by offering some of my observations about what government's response to COVID means for efforts to push a Green New Deal. And then I'll turn things over to Pia and Scott to respond and maybe tie in lessons for trade reform. So in no particular order, the first thing that I've noticed that I think is worth really highlighting is that we need to listen to science, of course, and that's amazingly what we've been doing in large part in the response to COVID-19. Of course, it's still being politicized. There's still challenges, but we all know our public health officials might name in a way we never did before. We see governments and politicians deferring to public health experts and epidemiologists on this issue. And of course, we need to do the same thing in the context of climate change. The science should be front and center and the scientists need to have a more prominent place at the table. Another observation is that governments are acting based on the worst possible outcome to COVID-19, and that's the correct thing to do. They're not saying, well, it's possible that an uncontrolled outbreak doesn't harm us. So let's take the chance. They're saying there's a chance that uncontrolled outbreak is catastrophic, and therefore we must take serious actions. And of course, the same is true of climate change. We don't know exactly what's going to happen, but we know that the worst possible scenario for climate change is existential for us, and we really can't take that risk. Another observation is that governments are thinking long-term and acting short-term. What we've seen is the most successful countries to respond to COVID have been the ones that imposed very severe and aggressive measures while case counts were still low before they got so significant. So it seemed like an over reaction, but in hindsight was the right approach. Again, climate change is the same. If we wait until there's kind of incontrovertible evidence, although, of course, there already is, but just kind of devastation beyond our comprehension to then decide to take action on climate change, of course, it's too late. Another couple of quick observations. One is that we've seen some incredible behavioral change in the context of COVID-19. And of course, not all of that change is something we want to preserve. We don't physical distancing is not necessarily a solution to climate change or anything, but the point is that what we thought of as immutable behaviors can actually be changed. People can stop driving, they can stop flying, they can stop consuming as much very quickly, and so we can't be afraid of including behavioral and cultural change as part of our solution to climate change. Similarly, we've seen some incredible efforts by governments to mobilize strategic industries. Governments should be leading and directing private sector's response to crisis. We've seen that with governments pushing manufacturers to start producing personal protective equipment. Of course, we'll need similar efforts in the context of a Green New Deal to get our manufacturers, our private sector, moving in the right direction. We've seen unprecedented supports for displaced workers. Of course, we need to do the same thing for fossil fuel workers and anyone displaced either by the climate policies or by climate change itself. So really, the overarching lesson that I've pulled out of these last few months is that in the response of a very severe and significant crisis, you need to go big and you need to go fast. And again, we've seen that the countries that have been most successful in suppressing COVID-19, but also the ones that have been most successful in rebounding, were the ones that took the most aggressive and comprehensive action in the short term. So they incurred the greatest short-term costs, but the lowest long-term costs. And that's a lesson that rings true in the context of climate change. So I'm going to turn things over to Pia and Scott. I'd be interested in your thoughts on this issue. How has COVID-19 and the government response to COVID-19 maybe changed the environment for how we talk about a Green New Deal and about trade? Pia, why don't we start with you? I don't know if it has already changed the attitude towards trade policy amongst governments, but I think there is a potential it will. I mentioned potential ISDS lawsuits against measures that governments are taking in the context of the pandemic, be they action to produce affordable vaccines or decisions that allow people to still have access to clean water to wash their hands, even though they can no longer pay the water bill and all the economic measures that we will see in the future around debt restructuring, et cetera, that governments will need to take to deal with the economic and financial crisis. All of these measures are mentioned by international law firms that make a lot of money when investors sue states and they are already advertising the ISDS regime to them. This is scandalous, but it also brings with it the opportunity to show how crotesquely crazy this regime is and how dangerous it can be for governments that just protect the health of their people and try to prevent economic collapse. So I think there is a potential to use the COVID crisis and the advertising we are seeing and the potential claims that will come to highlight the flaws of this specific angle of the trade regime. And I think linking it to climate change then is just, it's an easy step. And I see that I don't know how it is or how the debate was about the case that I mentioned that was filed against the US or the ongoing case against Canada, but in Europe, people care or start to care about ISDS when they hear that climate action is being challenged in this regime. Climate activists are outraged, the media is getting interested, so there are opportunities and it's up to us to just try to use them again and again. And I think, I mean, what you described Hedja and the unthinkable steps that governments have taken in the pandemic or unthinkable a couple of months ago that I think when you look at them at face value, some of them are actually not so big or they appear big as decisions because we, our imagination has become so small. You know, when there is no alternative, neoliberal, hey days. And the same is true for the trade regime. I mean, cancelling an agreement that is there for let's say 20 years that has no or very few public benefits and many public risks shouldn't be such a big decision. And maybe that's what the pandemic and the reactions by governments to it teaches us, you know, that we can become a bit more brave again in our thinking and describe actions as actually not so big, but just common sense and very important actions. So I do hope that the space for changing the trade regime will be, will become a little bit bigger in the context of this crisis than it has been in the last years. But obviously, as you all know, there's also the risk that the exact opposite happens and that we will get more of the same as as a deep response that is pushed by big business also in the context of the crisis. So yeah, I don't know, it's maybe a bit of a ambivalent answer. Thanks, Pia. Scott, that same question. What lessons can we draw from the COVID-19 pandemic and the government response to it that are relevant to the struggle for a global Green New Deal? Okay. As we've heard previously in this series, many of the most effective steps to stimulate a just economic recovery from the pandemic and global Green New Deals, they lie outside the trade system or are actively discouraged by current rules. Now, while the COVID-19 crisis is still far from contained in developed countries, its impacts in the global south are, I find them really terrifying to watch. As Walden Bellow said in the very first webinar of this series, the economic impacts in regions like Latin America could end up endangering as many people as the virus itself, developing countries face a cascade of problems, worsening debt loads, loss of remittances, economic hardship from low commodity prices, drying up of demand in foreign markets, and shortages of affordable food and medicines. Now, in confronting the pandemic and in advocating for global Green New Deals, the left should pursue a vision of genuine international cooperation in contrast to both the neoliberal mantra of restoring open markets on the one hand and right-wing xenophobic isolationism on the other. Many of the most promising progressive solutions to the COVID-19 crisis and and the recovery that must follow that should also be part of a coordinated global response to the climate emergency. These include full debt forgiveness for the global south, technology transfer and suspension of intellectual property monopolies for vaccines, medicines and green energy technologies, massive increases in foreign aid to assist with containing the pandemic and a green economic recovery, more like more localization of production beginning with essential products such as food, medical supplies and increased resilience of local and international supply chains. And finally, fair taxation and clamping down on corporate tax avoidance to finance basic public services and economic recovery. We need to be seriously considering global wealth taxes and financial transaction taxes. Now, in crafting a global Green New Deal, develop countries and privileged elites that are most responsible for the climate crisis must shoulder the greater responsibility. How the world addresses the pandemic and its impacts in the global south will be an important test as to whether we are able to build a fair just transition to a decarbonized economy and whether displaced workers and frontline communities in the north and south will trust global Green New Deals aimed at supporting them on this transition. So at that point, I'll turn it back to you, Hadrian, and we can open the floor to questions. Thanks very much, Scott. Yeah, that's exactly what we'll do. So we've got a whole bunch of now come in. So thank you very much. Again, if it's not too late to add your questions, click on the Q&A box. You can type in a question there and we'll do our best to get to them. I also want to just mention to welcome our viewers who are joining us on Facebook. So this Zoom call is being streamed live to Facebook and we've got a number of people there as well. So you're not going to be able to type into the Q&A box, but hopefully you're still getting a lot out of this. So let's go to our first question. I'm going to combine a couple that we've seen overlapping. And this first one is about basically the issue of campaigning. So what are the key points that you see campaigners having the biggest impact right now in reforming the trade regime? And on a related note, we had a question about where are the environmental NGOs? Because it seems like a lot of campaigners who used to work on trade have made climate their focus and have maybe left trade behind. So what's the role for environmental NGOs and what is the broader role for campaigners in reforming this system? Either of you can pass on this, but maybe we'll start with Scott to respond to that question. Okay. And I'm very keen to hear Pia's views on this as well. But I think the most campaignable action items right now are eliminating ISDS. As Hadrian says, we've seen that as possible, at least as between Canada and the United States and Kazma. It's fantastic work that's being done all around the world and by the CEO and others, Seattle, the Brussels Network in Europe. But I think this is a real moment to double down on that campaign. A second, I think, focus that encompasses a lot of what we've been talking about is just basically this simple idea of shielding climate action from challenge under trade and investment treaties. And there are various ways that could be accomplished, but through in the next Paris Treaty or in agreements if we are negotiating the further or just unilateral declarations by governments that they're not going to abide challenges to their climate initiatives. As for environmental NGOs, I mean, I see quite a bit of interest from environmental NGOs in these issues. I mean, especially ISDS. And although it's true that I would say in North America, some of the coalitions were quiet for a period of years. I mean, we've been at this for a long time. I think there's certainly climate action activists and many environmental groups work closely with CCPA and others now. And so I feel like we're in this together. I can turn it over to Pien, just a second. But we had a question about what is ISDS? So it's an acronym we've been throwing around a lot. It stands for Investor State Dispute Settlement. It's a clause found in many free trade and investment agreements that allows a foreign investor or foreign or multinational corporation to sue a host government for measures that they may have affected their investment, affected its profitability or otherwise. And so that's come up a lot. And I should mention that we have a webinar coming up next week. We'll talk a bit more about it at the end of this one. That will be looking into ISDS in a lot of detail. So certainly if you're interested in the topic, do please tune in next week. But we'll turn things over to Pien to address the issue of campaigning. Well, actually, I would second what Scott has said. I think ISDS is vulnerable and we just need to continue to try to bring it down. It will fall at one point. And the pandemic and climate change are to, I mean, I don't want to sound cynical, no, but from a campaigning perspective, they are very good issues, you know, to educate the public and policy makers about the risks of this regime. I think there's also educational work to be done around the, again, maybe to also look at the pandemic and measures that governments are taking in the areas of medicines and economic recovery and how they clash with other provisions in trade agreements. I don't think that this has been done enough yet. And on the question of environmental NGOs, I think it's our job, you know, to bring them back into the trade arena. If they have left, these are complicated issues. But it's our job then, you know, to tell climate activists and climate organizations, what is the problem with this regime? And I agree with Scott, I see the same in Europe. It's maybe not the number one issue on their agenda, but climate change is also a very vast agenda. But they are, they understand the risk and they are willing, you know, to join our work. So I wouldn't be so pessimistic on the environmental groups. Yeah. We have a question about moving kind of from campaigning to the kind of more bureaucracy or the kind of closed door negotiations. What do we need to do to change how trade negotiations happen so that we can achieve some of the goals we're talking about? And I might add to that question, Pia, since you did mention that there are a number of countries that have started to move in a positive direction, certainly not all of them, but some countries have started to either roll back ISDS or pull out of treaties entirely. Can you maybe speak to what changed within those countries? Was it their negotiators that changed? Was it their political leaders that changed? What happened kind of in the seat of power that caused those governments to take a new direction when it came to trade negotiations? So Pia, why don't we start with you and then we can go to Scott. Well, so I wouldn't say that their position changed to trade negotiations as a whole, but for some of the countries that got out of ISDS, terminated some treaties, renegotiated others. The first thing that happened, unfortunately, is they were hit by claims, sometimes very scandalous ones, very expensive ones. So that initiated a process of realization of dam. What did we sign in the 90s that now allows an investor to challenge anti-discrimination policies? We never expected that. So unfortunately, in the world of ISDS, unless it becomes very painful for a government there, you will see very little change. But once that happens, once the claim hits, that opens the space for civil society then to build pressure. And I think that is what happened in countries like Ecuador, like Bolivia, India as well, Indonesia. So it is a combination of the claim, campaigning, public pressure, and then probably the right government in power. So yeah, maybe that's the answer. And on the question of trade negotiations and do they have to change, of course, that is a big part of the problem. Negotiations are happening behind closed doors. The public sees the trade agreement when it's a done deal. There is very little opportunity before to understand what's going on to have an informed public debate, like what is just normal with every other law in a democracy. It's a problem that you have such a strong grip of corporate lobbyists on negotiators, the mindset of negotiators is a problem. We just open up the world and automatically that will produce benefits for the wider public with other officials, which would represent other societal interests not being present. So yes, the way these negotiations are conducted continues to be a problem. And so again, it's our job to continue to to highlight these flaws. They can be used actually to create scandals. I mean, I don't know again about other parts of the world, but in Europe, journalists love it, you know, when you just showed them, this is the list of, I don't know, businesses that are on advisory bodies that then advise the European Commission in their trade agreements. These are the long list of lobbyists they met. And for us, it might seem normal and the way the set a reality, but it is not for members of the public and the media as well. Adrian, you seem to be muted. There you go. You would like me to speak? Yes, please. Yes. Well, there are so many ways to answer that question. I mean, of course, and there has to be much more public participation and transparency before and during negotiations, how we achieve that is again, just through public pressure. I think though that I mean, even among, you know, free trade advocates, neoliberals, there is a sense that this agenda is running out of steam. First, there's diminishing returns when trade barriers are already so low. And we have experience of, you know, the many ways in which trade agreements enhance corporate power in ways that really have so little to do with trade. Intellectual property is one of the most ghastly investor-state dispute settlement we've talked about today. We should acknowledge that the WTO is in serious trouble, although it, you know, there are those who think that, you know, the answer is to double down and negotiate a very ambitious e-commerce agreement, which again, is like just repeating all the mistakes of the past, like a corporate influenced agreement in an area where national governments haven't even sorted out how they want to regulate it themselves. So, you know, there are those who haven't learned from the malaise that now infects the WTO, both on the negotiating side and the dispute settlement side. I guess the challenge for us on the left is, as I said earlier, is how do we counterpose? Often, you know, the free traders and the neoliberals, they are in response to the Trumpian challenge. They kind of wrap themselves in the flag of international cooperation. And I think we have to counterpose, and the climate emergency is a real opportunity to do that. We have to say, well, what would genuine international cooperation to the benefit of all really look like? Because we don't see that reflected in these neoliberal trade agreements, trade investment agreements. Thanks, Scott. We've got a couple of questions about the issue of regulatory cooperation. It's a shame our colleague, Stuart True, is not on the panel because he's the real expert here, but maybe we'll dive into it briefly. And there was a mention that, yes, although the USMCA, QSMA or whatever, did rollback ISCS, it introduced this new idea of good regulatory practice so that instead of corporations and investors being able to challenge regulations after they get put in place, they can now just prevent those regulations from coming into place initially. Maybe, Scott, why don't we start with you? Maybe you could provide a quick overview of what the risk is here, and is it as significant as ISDS, or is it just something we have to keep our eye on? Well, I think the risk is quite high. It's more insidious than ISDS. And its so-called regulatory cooperation is probably the most significant new threat posed by the way that the trade trade agenda has been changing. And some of this is actually occurring outside the context of formal trade treaties. But as you referred to, Hadron, I mean, the idea from corporate lobbyists is they can't wait. They don't want to have to wait to challenge a regulatory measure that affects them adversely after the fact at the WTO or through a bilateral trade treaty or through investor state. They want to nip it in the bud. They want to be in the room when regulations are formulated. And, of course, they are already. But regulatory cooperation is about formalizing that. It's about requiring national and state and provincial regulators to open themselves to influence and to consider the views or to delay until they have informed foreign stakeholders, usually corporations, of what's going on. And it's just another, I mean, anyone who thinks that our regulatory system is flawed because corporations don't have enough influence really hasn't looked very carefully at our regulatory system. So, yes, it's a threat. I wouldn't put it on the same scale as ISDS, but it's a way in which the agenda is slipping and sliding and shifting and that we should be very aware of. And I would commend the work of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Sharon Treat, my colleague, our colleague Stuart True, and again, CEO and others who have been dogging this file. So, keep it on your radar. Scott, do you have anything to add about regulatory, so-called regulatory cooperation? Not much, maybe just two sentences in which the business community describes it, which makes it quite clear, I think, what Scott just described. I mean, when the TTIP negotiations or the trade negotiations between the EU and the US started or before they started, the US Chamber of Commerce and Business Europe, which is the biggest corporate lobby group in Brussels, they worked on a super long document about regulatory cooperation and they thought they were pretty honest and say, what we want to do is we want to co-write legislation or regulation. So, it's really about co-writing and the US Chamber of Commerce later said in a meeting with the Commission, what regulatory cooperation is for us, it's a gift that keeps on giving. You know, you can always use it. You can use it against regulations to take toxic chemicals of the market. You can take it against anything that makes maybe medicines more affordable. What have you? It's a gift that you can keep unpacking as a company and as a business lobbyist. So, that shows quite nicely why they are so keen to get it in trade deals. I would agree with Scott. It's a new trend. You can see it in trade deals across the world and it is indeed dangerous, but very difficult for us, I would say, to monitor and not easy to campaign on, even if it's so clear, but the shadiness of how it works makes campaigning quite hard, I would say, but still we have to do it. It's one of the new battlegrounds, I would say, in the trade field. Pia, I just wanted to highlight a comment we got from our colleague Manuel Perez-Rosha is just pointing out that the so-called elimination of ISDS and the USMCA is maybe not what it appears, and of course, Canada and Mexico continue to have ISDS through TPP and so on. So, it wasn't a total victory, certainly, and we don't want to give the wrong impression. And I would encourage you, again, if you want to learn more about the topic, Manuel is one of the people involved in our webinar next week at this time, and we'll be talking more detail about ISDS, hardlaw and softlaw. We do have another question about something that Pia and Scott, you both mentioned earlier on about we need some kind of overarching clause or carve out or something to prevent kind of trade, free trade agreements being used to challenge climate measures or prevent them from coming into place. And we have a question about what's kind of the most efficient, and maybe I'll add the word what's the most possible or maybe plausible approach? Is it to try and work through all of the existing network of agreements and trying to change each of them maybe at a bilateral level, or is it possible that we can bring into force something like a new Paris agreement that actually takes legal precedence over the existing network of free trade agreements around the world? What's the more, I guess, realistic approach? Scott, why don't you start? Well, there's a principle of international law that later treaties among the same parties take precedence over earlier treaties. So clearly, the most efficient thing to do would be to have a multilateral instrument that just overrides previous rights. So that is the neatest solution. It may take some time to get that. So that's why I emphasize that countries and progressive governments should act on their own by saying they're no longer going to bring these types of cases, they're no longer going to support their investors or enable them to bring cases again, to challenge climate action, that the minimal harm that might be done to our companies, the imagined harms often, are they're inconsequential compared to, you know, the assisting countries like China and India and others to move from coal-fired power to renewables. You know, we have to see the forest for the trees here. So I think we should have progressive governments should should stay very clearly that they're not going to abide by challenges, they're not going to bring them. And they, of course, like minor governments should begin working together and build a critical mass to the point where we could achieve that overarching multilateral instrument or a very concise paragraph to be inserted in all these agreements, which would shield climate action. Pierre, do you have anything to add? Maybe just, I think the experience of ISDS shows all these battles, even if they're small and even if it's one government getting out there meaningful because they have knock-on effects on the regime as a whole. So while I would agree with Scott, obviously, a multilateral instrument negotiated by climate negotiators with no traits, folks in the room, you know, bringing in their loopholes that then make the instrument completely useless again. That would be super cool. But at the same time, all the little fights are important as well. And we have a huge battle over the energy charter treaty, for example, in Europe at the moment. And if you imagined just that treaty being cancelled or even if it's just the European Union member states leaving, which is a scenario that is maybe not around the corner, but it's not impossible. That would stop the expansion of this agreement to the global south, you know, to Africa, Latin America, Asia, and prevent, you know, that countries like Bangladesh, you know, get bound even more, you know, that are just getting into coal. So I would say all the little and the big fights are meaningful. And it's hard to predict what knock-on effects they will have, but they will have. So yeah, I would say it's not just a big scenario for the multilateral new agreement, but the little defensive fights as well that matter. That's great. Thanks. Yeah, it's a good reminder that, yeah, of course, it would be great if we had just like one document that just overruled everything that's out there. But there's a lot of value in winning these smaller battles. One really quick question I'll address. Why does the Green New Deal not mention nuclear disarmament? And the short answer is it does. It just kind of depends on who you ask. The Green New Deal is not owned by anyone, so it kind of depends on whose vision of a Green New Deal we're talking about, but certainly nuclear disarmament is included in a lot of different formulations of a Green New Deal. I wanted to go to a question of if not the free trade regime, since we obviously have so many concerns about it, but we don't want to revert into a sort of nationalist isolationist situation where we're not engaging with other countries. So I'd be curious to hear from each of you whether that's in the context of EU in North America or more globally. What is the alternative we would like to see? How do we continue to have productive international engagement in cooperation and of course trade, but not with these kind of restrictive neoliberal free trade agreements? Pia, do you want to start on that one? I mean, that's a huge question, obviously. And I mean, for me, what has always been very inspiring is the movement of La Via Campesina, so peasants, landless people who for many years have worked as an international movement with people from the Global South and the Global North together and have developed an alternative concept that in this case obviously is limited to or not limited, but has a strong focus on agricultural food production. But the principles that they came up with as an international list solidarity movement, if you think them through for other economic sectors as well, I think that gives a good indication. It is not an anti-trade focus, but it shifts the focus from trading everything around the world, whether it makes sense or not to who owns the means of production, who controls which parts of production processes, clearly a relocalization or re-regionalization of global value chains. So I think we can learn a lot from these movements and the concepts that they have developed for many years in an internationalist vision, not a, you know, we just close the borders and that's it. But obviously, yeah, it's a huge question. And it is interesting that in the context of the pandemic, we see governments including crazily world market oriented governments like the German one, so my government, so to say, really reconsidering the, how to say, the religion of free trade and global value chains because they have experienced that they can also be vulnerable to the effects that they have. So again, I think it's an it's an opportunity that that we can use in this policy field. Thanks, Pia. And I'll turn it to Scott. And I should also maybe mention before you get going, Scott that that the many of the people involved in producing this webinar series were involved in producing a report called Beyond NAFTA 2.0 toward a progressive trade agenda for people and planet, which does actually start to address this question. And it's certainly worth having a look at if you're interested in it. And on that note, Scott, I'll turn it to you. Yeah, thanks. And I would also encourage people to look at that report where we tried to deal with this very huge issue in in the context within the context of North America, but I think there's probably some I'm sure there are some lessons for everyone there. Pia has already referred to how the COVID-19 crisis has shaken some of these globalization mantras and shibboleths. I mean, everyone, including elites now, acknowledge the vulnerabilities in global supply chains that are, you know, organized around, well, long distance transportation for one, but, you know, saving pennies by exploiting labor more effectively somewhere else. So I mean, we hear concepts like relocalization, concepts like resiliency are are in the mainstream now. And so there is an opportunity to make to make those fair trade kind of arguments. When again, I think we do have to keep hammering on the point that the international trade regime, trade and investment regime is really about enhancing corporate power. And, you know, I read a book recently by Quince Lobodian, which I would recommend everyone. The WTO was actually theorized. It was conceived as a way to constrain democracy in order to protect property rights by some of the early neoliberal thinkers and obviously was driven very heavily by corporate interests in the EU and in the United States in particular. So when we look at the trade regime, I think it's important that we're not talking about isolationism. We're not talking about ending international trade and the benefits that can come from fair exchange, but we're talking about is getting that trade architecture back to basics. There's no place for intellectual property rules, which are actually the opposite of liberal trade in the trade regime. There's no place for investor state dispute settlement. We need more balance within the rules. We need more flexibility. And all this extra baggage that corporate lobbyists were able to attach to the trade regime needs to be either dispensed with or reformed. Now, I'll just end by saying that, and this I think will be one of the themes in next week's webinar, is because of its binding enforcement, the WTO and NAFTA and later other agreements kind of were elevated above other aspects of international law like human rights, which is also binding, but they're hard to enforce internationally, environmental protection, sharing of intellectual property. So I think what we have to do is pause. Well, we have to retract and retrench on the trade and investment treaty side and build up the international system of human rights, environmental protection, climate action around it and create a more balanced international system. And that is obviously a project of lifetimes, but climate action gives us, I think, a sense of urgency that we really have to tackle this now. Thanks very much, Scott. And I think that's a great place to end as we've reached the end of our time. So I just want to say thank you again to P.A. Abrahart and Scott Sinclair for joining me today. A big thanks to the whole team that helped put on this webinar, including Aaron Eisenberg, who's been doing a lot behind the scenes for us right now, and everyone else who's been involved in putting on this webinar series. Of course, again, a big thank you to our interpreters, Patry and Cristobal, who've done a fantastic job making this webinar more accessible. And as my kind of concluding note, I want to mention that we have another webinar coming up next week. It's going to be at the exact same time, whatever this local time is for you. It's 11 a.m. Eastern for me. We're going to have a webinar on extractivism, human rights and ISDS, hard law versus soft law. It's going to be a very fantastic webinar with a number of great speakers. So I'd very much encourage you to join that one. So again, thanks again. My name is Hadrian Merton Kirkwood with the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, and it's been a real pleasure to be your host today. And again, thank you very much and have a great day.