Bloomberg via Getty Images William 'Bill' Morneau, Canada's finance minister, pauses while speaking at the Toronto Region Board of Trade in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Friday, Oct. 28, 2016. Morneau is defending his recent spate of mortgage rule changes designed to tighten the housing market, saying he's concerned about household debt levels. Photographer: Cole Burston/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), negotiated in secret, has been facing massive public opposition.

In opposing the TPP, some have incorrectly argued that the TPP will pit migrant workers against Canadian workers. In fact, this trade agreement will greatly harm migrant workers. It will do so in two key ways.

First, TPP will result in lower protections, wages and working conditions for workers primarily in the poorer countries that are signatories to the TPP. This will force many of them to move from rural areas to urban areas, and then to migrate out of their countries for basic opportunities.

Second, when those low-waged and racialized migrant workers arrive in Canada, they will largely do so through the temporary foreign workers program, without permanent status, and be tied to their employers and excluded from basic protections. At the same time, they will face a miseducated public who has been incorrectly led to believe that migrant workers are taking Canadians jobs.

The TPP is an agreement between 12 countries: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the USA and Vietnam. While touted as a free trade agreement, it is in fact the opposite.

"It's called free trade, but that's just a joke," according to MIT Linguistics Professor Noam Chomsky. "These are extreme, highly protectionist measures designed to undermine freedom of trade. In fact, much of what's leaked about the TPP indicates that it's not about trade at all, it's about investor rights."

Only six of the 30 chapters of the TPP are about trade at all.

In fact, as many have argued, 97 per cent of Canada's exports to these 12 countries are already duty free, or tariff free, which is the key barrier trade agreements are supposed to remove. Only six of the 30 chapters of the TPP are about trade at all.

To understand what TPP may do, consider NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), signed between the U.S., Canada and Mexico in 1994. As a result of NAFTA, article 27 of the Mexican constitution was cancelled. This section of the constitution protected collectively owned Indigenous lands from being privatized. Once cancelled, Indigenous lands faced mass privatizations and hundreds of thousands of people were pushed out of their communities. For example, Indigenous people made up seven per cent of Mexican migrants in 1991 to 1993 in California, the years just before the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In 2006 to 2008, they made up 29 per cent -- four times more. The TPP will do that at much greater scale

The TPP entrenches ISDS (investor state dispute settlement), which allows corporations to sue countries if environmental or other protections result in loss of corporate profit. Of the 77 known NAFTA investor-state claims, 35 have been against Canada, 22 have targeted Mexico and 20 have targeted the U.S. While Canada has been sued more, as a country with five times Mexico's GDP, the impacts in Canada are bad but proportionally lower than those felt in Mexico.

One of the reasons Mexico is sued less is because Mexican authorities have swiftly downgraded environmental policies before they can be sued. This has downgraded working conditions, wages and the ecology of large regions, forcing out-migration and the creation of migrant workers. The same can be expected from the TPP.