Since Ars wrote about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) last year, it has gradually moved up the UK's political agenda, culminating in the recent pledge by Jeremy Corbyn to scrap it if he is elected as prime minister before it is completed, and to fight it if he is not. But while many people are increasingly worried about what might happen with TTIP, there's another trade agreement, one which has already been signed, which is about to bring in many of the same controversial measures almost unnoticed.

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, or CETA, is a deal between the European Union and Canada, and in many respects is a kind of mini-TTIP. It has not yet come into force, but is very close to doing so. If it does, it will provide a trade deal blueprint that will make it more likely that an agreement with the US can be reached for TTIP. If it is stopped, which is still a possibility, it will add to the doubts about the wisdom of concluding the TTIP deal.

The "green light" for the European Commission to negotiate a new trade deal with Canada was formally given in April 2009. As the press release pointed out, before they decided to engage in negotiations, the EU and Canada agreed in 2007 to conduct a joint study into the likely economic benefits. Here's the key result from that study, which was published in October 2008:

The annual real income gain by the year 2014, compared to the baseline scenario, would be approximately €11.6 billion for the EU (representing 0.08 percent of EU GDP), and approximately €8.2 billion for Canada (representing 0.77 percent of Canadian GDP). Total EU exports to Canada go up by 24.3 percent or €17 billion by 2014 while Canadian bilateral exports to the EU go up by 20.6 percent or €8.6 billion by 2014.

The methodology used for the study is the same as that employed for a later report on TTIP. As Ars pointed out last year, the GDP growth figures generally bandied around by supporters of TTIP are misleading: they quote what could be the ultimate boost to the GDP levels many years down the line. In the case of TTIP, the best-case GDP boost scenario—0.5 percent—would only arrive after 10 years, and only represents an extra GDP growth of just 0.05 percent per year on average.

For CETA, this figure is even smaller: the 0.08 percent boost to GDP quoted above would be seen after seven years of having the trade deal in place. This means that CETA is expected to increase the EU's GDP growth by a little over 0.01 percent per year—a vanishingly small amount completely eclipsed by uncertainties in the econometric modelling.

Back in 2008, when the vast majority of people assumed that trade deals were deeply boring, and would have little impact on their daily lives, the European Commission could ignore the minimal benefits of CETA, and proceed anyway. The talks were formally launched in May 2009, when the EU trade commissioner Catherine Ashton proclaimed: "a comprehensive economic and trade agreement between the European Union and Canada will boost the two economies as the world recovers from economic recession."

Thereafter, CETA more or less dropped off the radar, as negotiations took place behind closed doors without much interest from the general public on either side of the Atlantic. The European Commission seemed happy to keep it that way: it only issued one press release about CETA in 2010, with nothing on the negotiations for the whole of 2011 and 2012 other than the EU-Canada Sustainability Impact Assessment, which confirmed the minuscule gains that CETA was likely to produce for both sides.

As with TTIP, some of the secret negotiating texts for CETA leaked, including one in July 2012 that revealed the agreement included proposals taken word-for-word from the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which had just been thrown out by the European Parliament. Measures included criminalising copyright infringement on even a minor scale, and encouraging ISPs to spy on their users.

As Professor Michael Geist, a Canadian expert on copyright and Internet law, wrote at the time: "The European Commission strategy appears to be to use CETA as the new ACTA, burying its provisions in a broader Canadian trade agreement with the hope that the European Parliament accepts the same provisions it just rejected with the ACTA framework." Fortunately, this burst of publicity seems to have led the European Commission to step back from some of the worst ideas revealed in the leak, and to issue a rare CETA factsheet in August 2012, which concluded with the pointed comment: "Nothing is introduced 'through the back door.'"

In October 2013, the European Commission put out a press release with the headline: "EU and Canada strike free trade deal." Most people would assume that indicated the CETA negotiations had been concluded, but that was not the case. Instead the Commission was announcing that the EU and Canada had reached "a political agreement on the key elements of a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) after months of intense negotiations." As a consequence, it said: "On the basis of this political breakthrough, the negotiators will now be able to continue the process and settle all the remaining technical issues." In other words, the talks would continue pretty much as before, but the European Commission wanted to allay fears that CETA was grinding to a halt, and so announced this non-event.

It was nearly a year later, in September 2014, that the leaders of the EU and Canada met formally to "celebrate" the actual completion of CETA. That was still not the end of the process of implementing CETA, which is continuing to this day, but it was an important moment. Since the text had been finished, it would finally be released officially, rather than through leaks, and people could start examining its proposals.

Listing image by Ryan Hagerty