Yet dig beneath the heady promises and my weekly technology law column (homepage version, Toronto Star version) notes that the benefits for Canada are hard to identify. The price of admission was very steep – Canada appears to have agreed to conditions that grant it second-tier status – and the economic benefits from improved access to TPP economies are likely to be relatively minor since we already have free trade agreements with four of the ten participants.
Given those conditions, why aggressively pursue entry into the negotiations?