...The deal – signed Monday following negotiations that stretched over the weekend between 12 nations representing 40 per cent of global GDP – has the potential to dramatically reshape Canada’s trade landscape. It will gradually reduce steep tariffs on a number of Canadian exports to mature markets such as Japan and Australia, as well as emerging markets such as Malaysia and Vietnam, even as it opens up Canada to imports from those countries.

Outside of a few sectors in Canada that will face bruising new competition from Japanese and U.S. companies – such as Canadian dairy farmers, domestic automobile-makers and car-parts manufacturers – many businesses were hopeful that the TPP deal would give their businesses and sectors new momentum...

For many exporters in Western Canada, the best part of the new trade deal was clearly better and cheaper access to Japan, the world’s third-largest economy after the United States and China – the latter of which is not part of the TPP...

But not all Canadian industries looked forward to TPP coming into effect. For some producers in Canada’s protected dairy sector, the deal could spell disaster. It is for this reason that Canadian dairy farmers and auto-makers lobbied intensely against the bill, as did Japan’s farmers – who fear their smaller operations would be bankrupted by large U.S. agri-businesses flooding their market with cheaper, inferior products...

“It is impossible to know if Canada negotiated a good deal or not until we see the final TPP agreement. But we will almost certainly be worse off outside the deal than in it because of the erosion of our NAFTA preferences,” said [Yuen Pau Woo, a fellow at Simon Fraser University’s Jack Austin Centre for Asia Pacific Business Studies.]...

This has been excerpted from 5 October 2015 edition of The Globe and Mail.