CETA is a smaller-scale agreement between the EU and Canada, but it‘s more important than it looks. It allows US companies with subsidiaries in Canada to use the agreement‘s corporate sovereignty provisions to sue the EU — and there are 42,000 such companies according to one analysis (pdf). As a result, CETA has been called „TTIP by the backdoor,“ since it would provide a handy way for US companies to put pressure on EU nations even if TTIP suffers the same fate as TPP.