The Liberals’ position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) hasn’t changed, Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland said Wednesday evening at the Canadian-American Business Council’s 21st annual summit in Ottawa: they’re still consulting with stakeholders and haven’t made a decision on ratification.

Proponents of the massive trade deal looking for a signal, however, might have come out the summit slightly concerned.

The agreement that took eight years to negotiate, and which the Harper government only concluded weeks before the federal election, certainly didn’t sound like it would be getting rubber-stamped by the new trade minister.

In fact, when BNN reporter Kristina Partsinevelos, who was moderating a panel Wednesday evening that also included Transport Minister Marc Garneau and American Ambassador Bruce Heyman, asked Freeland how she would convince opponents in the audience, Freeland declined.

“It’s not my job to persuade anybody that TPP is good…That’s not my job right now,” Freeland said.

“We’re not the government that negotiated this deal. It is an incredibly difficult deal. It’s 6,000 pages and as far as we are concerned, this deal really became available for Canadians to review — Canadian stakeholders — yesterday. That’s when the text became available on our website, because that’s when the French language translation became available.”

Having met with stakeholders from supply-managed agriculture industries earlier Wednesday, and auto part manufacturers on Monday, Freeland explained that they’re still in the early stages of the consultation process. And that it’s going to be “rigorous.”

“We’re hearing very diverse points of view. Some people are very, very strongly in favour. Some people, strongly opposed. Jim Balsillie? There’s a person I’ve been talking to a lot about this as well,” she said.

The former Research In Motion CEO has come out against the agreement because of what he calls its “troubling” intellectual property rules.

Freeland also paraphrased University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in internet and e-commerce law and another critic of some of the agreement’s intellectual property, privacy, copyright, and internet governance provisions.

“The way Michael put it is, signing is like dating. Ratifying is like getting married. And that distinction is really significant. There are many trade deals that have been signed and never ratified. What I would also add is — not signing is like breaking up. And for Canada, what would be a very big step would be stepping back and losing our special privileges as an originator TPP country.”