44th Parl. 1st Sess.
February 8, 2023 02:00PM
Madam Speaker, I hate to have to do this, but in the time since you ruled on the previous point of order, we have not had any connection yet to the bill.
Perhaps, through you, Madam Speaker, we could remind the member to tie this to the bill, because we are actually talking about Bill C-34 and not a laundry list of funding announcements by the government that have nothing to do with the bill.
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Madam Speaker, I am going to share my time with the member for Abbotsford.
Conservatives have been calling for changes to this act for years. For nearly eight years, the government has ignored the growing role of state-owned and state-controlled enterprises in Canada’s economy. For nearly eight years, the government has failed to take seriously the threat posed by the government of Beijing.
For nearly eight years, the government has sat back passively while Beijing has used ostensibly private corporations as proxies to project its government's power and influence into the Canadian economy. After eight years, the government has finally tabled legislation to strengthen the Investment Canada Act, which is a good thing, but it is something that should have been done years ago.
To assess the government's credibility on the issue, it is important that we examine its track record on protecting Canadians from investment by authoritarian regimes in the Canadian economy. This is a government that, in 2017, failed to conduct a national security review when Beijing-owned Hytera Communications bought Norsat.
The former minister Navdeep Bains and the Prime Minister falsely claimed that a review was done, obfuscating the mandatory 45-day waiting period for approval with an actual, fulsome national security review as defined in the existing act. Even Tom Mulcair, the former leader of the NDP, criticized the government for rubber stamping the Hytera deal.
This takeover had serious consequences for Canada’s credibility with our allies. Norsat was an American defence contractor, and Canada allowed this takeover without a proper security review. Such a review was an option, and is an option, for the government under the existing Investment Canada Act, and that option was not undertaken on the Hytera deal.
Since then, Hytera has been banned from doing business in the United States and faces 21 espionage charges. This is the company that the government let into Canada without a national security review on the Norsat deal. The same company then received a contract to supply radio communications work to the RCMP. The same company had a contract with the Canada Border Services Agency for X-ray equipment.
This is the same government that also failed to stop Anbang from buying a chain of seniors homes, as we heard earlier from the NDP. Anbang also bought other buildings, which raised concerns not only about the substandard care that subsequently occurred in the seniors homes it took over, but also about corporate espionage in other buildings that were part of that deal.
This is a government that contracted with a company, whose founder was connected to the very top echelons of the PRC, to supply X-ray equipment to 170 embassies. This is a government that took years to finally ban Huawei from being a supplier of infrastructure to Canada’s 5G network, despite the obvious national security concerns. This reluctance has compromised Canada’s credibility with our Five Eyes intelligence partners. The government’s current industry minister approved the Neo Lithium takeover without a national security review
The opposition has spent years raising important questions about cracks and loopholes in existing laws, while the government claimed that there was no need to change the law until now, and it falsely claimed that it was using the tools available to it to help keep Canadians safe. It did this with such arrogance. It claimed that the opposition was simply playing politics whenever we raised a question about national security.
This is what the Liberals do. They dig in, when they find themselves on the wrong side of an issue, then finally flip while ignoring their past intransigence. This sudden flip, like what we are seeing right now with Bill C-34, on the need to address investment by autocratic, state-owned enterprises, is just like last week’s flip on Bill C-21 when they attempted to ban hunting rifles and shotguns.
Did they admit that the opposition was right all along? No. Did they thank the opposition for raising a point that they made a mistake that needed to be fixed? Did they admit that they were misleading Canadians for months? Did they admit that they were falsely claiming that the opposition was lying about the consequences of their amendment? Did the Minister of Public Safety admit that he was wrong and that he had misled Canadians? Did he apologize for attacking the opposition's motives? No, of course not. That is not what they do.
What they do is attack the motives of those who criticize them. When it becomes absolutely clear, like it is on this issue today of investment by autocratic state-owned enterprises, they might backpedal, but they do not take responsibility. They do not apologize or admit they were wrong.
As the opposition, we are just doing our job when we raise questions about public policy concerns, identify mistakes the government has made and identify shortcomings in existing laws or potential consequences of new laws or policies. The opposition has an ancient and sacred obligation to force the government to try to be better, and I just wish that it would listen from time to time, especially when it comes to national security.
Liberals and Conservatives are probably not very far apart from each other on the role of government when it comes to national security. I would hope that we are not far apart. This is not an ideological difference. We all care about our national security. With that in mind, I have some suggestions and points for Parliament to consider and hopefully also for the government to consider.
The bill would give the minister significantly more power but not necessarily a pathway to the best decisions. One thing this bill would do is shift power from cabinet, from order in council, to direct ministerial decision-making. This may result in faster decision-making but not necessarily better decisions.
I am concerned that the lack of a clear, strong definition of a state-owned enterprise may harm foreign investment in Canada overall without protecting Canadians from hostile foreign governments. The Canadian economy relies on direct foreign investment, and the parliamentary secretary talked about that. We need foreign, private capital from reciprocating open economies, and we have to be careful about what signals the bill sends to global capital markets.
I am disappointed that the bill does not simply allow the government to ban governments of autocratic and hostile regimes, such as Russia, Iran, North Korea or the People's Republic of China, through a simple list. This might be the easiest way to deal with the small number of countries seeking to exert power and influence within the Canadian economy through state-owned enterprises.
I am concerned that the bill does not appear to capture transactions where, rather than shares, a Canadian company sells assets, such as mines, farms, intellectual property and data, to a foreign state-owned enterprise.
I am especially concerned that maintaining the existing $400-million threshold for a mandatory government approval of a foreign takeover leaves the door wide open for the growing concern of Beijing-affiliated entities buying up farms, fishing enterprises, wharves and airport cargo facilities. These enterprises may have diverse ownership, but in aggregate, they have the potential to distort markets for important commodities, such as food. If the buyer of a Canadian company is the Government of China, the threshold for a national security review should be zero dollars, and every transaction of the foreign enterprises owned by the state should be captured.
In short, I do agree that the bill is an attempt to address serious and important policy concerns, and I will support the motion that is before the House to send the bill to committee. My opposition colleagues and I are committed to working with other parliamentarians to make the bill better.
No party has a monopoly on good ideas. This is a great opportunity to show Canadians that parliamentarians can work together and that the result of Parliament's adversarial process is that the best ideas will prevail through debate. As we debate the bill and study it at committee, we can co-operate, get beyond past mistakes and get serious about protecting Canadians from property theft, espionage, intellectual property theft, market distortions and other harms that result when foreign governments that are hostile to Canada's way of life take advantage of our open society and open economy. We are talking about transactions that are not fuelled by the market but by the raw power of a state to exert its influence on the Canadian economy.
Therefore, I will vote for the bill, but it is weak and needs a lot of work.
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Madam Speaker, I think I was quite careful and precise in what I said, but I will repeat it. I said that if the foreign buyer is a Chinese state-owned enterprise, the threshold should be zero. The threshold for the dollar amount of a transaction by a Chinese state-owned enterprise should be zero.
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Madam Speaker, that is an excellent point, which I did touch on, but it bears repeating. The government failed to use the existing tools under this act in the past, so here we are, debating the creation of new tools and stronger tools with a government that would not use the tools that already existed. Its credibility on this issue is a problem, and we need to get really serious about this, not just through new laws but also through implementation of laws, both existing and new, as contemplated in Bill C-34.
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Madam Speaker, as I said both in my speech and in my remarks to the government deputy whip, if the buyer is a state-owned enterprise of an autocratic regime like the People's Republic of China, the threshold should be zero.
With respect to the preamble to her question regarding the increase to the threshold in general, I think that was made to be compliant with regulation under the WTO. I was not a member of that government, but that is my understanding of why that decision was made quite a number of years ago.
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Madam Speaker, that is what this is all about: debate to get the best ideas out there. That is why it is important to go to a zero-dollar threshold when we are talking about a state-owned enterprise from the People's Republic of China. They buy a series of small businesses that in aggregate can actually distort markets. Buying a single fishing boat or buying a single wharf is perhaps not going to distort the market, but when a whole series of transactions below a threshold are combined, it will have the effect of a much larger transaction.
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