- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sarnia—Lambton
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 68%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $118,419.33
- Government Page
Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. As we know, the Speaker issued guidelines to try to improve decorum in the House that says we are not to question the honesty of members in the House.
When talking about batteries, I provided the statistic from the Bureau of Transportation that said 3.5% of hybrid and electric vehicles have battery fires.
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Mr. Speaker, there has been a long history of the Liberal government making poor decisions by allowing Chinese Communist state-owned operations to take over operations. I will start with one, Anbang. Members will remember that then minister Navdeep Bains bought health care for seniors in B.C. It was a total disaster thereafter, and during the pandemic, the B.C. government had to step in and take over. For that reason, we do not need one individual making a decision on whether there should be a security review.
Does the member agree with the Conservative amendment that it would be better to have the Governor in Council or all cabinet members weigh in on those kinds of decisions?
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Mr. Speaker, one thing that is happening in Canada is that hundreds of millions of dollars of investment are leaving the country because we do not have a competitive landscape here. We have higher taxes, carbon tax 1.0 and 2.0, long approval processes in our regulatory process and uncertainty. We see that we would have to give away $31 billion to incite people to come to Canada and open up a business. Why was none of that put into the bill?
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Mr. Speaker, that was a good speech.
Before question period, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government said that Canada was a good place for investors.
However, investors keep leaving. There are a lot of rules, like those arising from the passage of Bill C‑69, the carbon tax is too high, and we have measures that do not exist in other countries.
Why is there nothing in this bill to deal with that problem?
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from the Bloc for the question.
There are indeed many examples of security problems where we can see that organizations have harmed Canada.
I think that the government is not paying close attention to agreements. We are going to fix that through Bill C‑34, however.
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Madam Speaker, that is a great question, actually. Members may recall I was on my feet in this House criticizing Navdeep Bains when he was the industry minister who did Anbang. I have been on my feet in this House criticizing every time one of these things has come along and calling it out, because of the danger and the breach of our privacy and the fact that they are allowing the Chinese Communist government to put security systems, information systems and software into Parliament, embassies, etc.
It is outrageous. It needs to get fixed. I have been calling for this now for eight long years.
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Madam Speaker, I see the outrage in the member opposite, but perhaps he could apply that to the party that he is supporting, the party that sold out health care in B.C. to Anbang. Does the member remember that? It was a total disaster. We had to come in and rescue them in the pandemic.
Huawei is another example, where the government sat on its decision for two years and let Huawei build all the 4G networks under Bell and Telus in this country.
Why does the member not take his outrage and apply it to the government that he is propping up?
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Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Louis‑Saint‑Laurent.
I rise today to address Bill C-34, an act to amend the Investment Canada Act. Bill C-34 is an attempt to update and strengthen the Investment Canada Act through seven significant amendments. Mainly, these changes to the act aim to protect Canada's national security with stricter regulations and higher penalties.
The main tenets of the bill attempt to introduce a pre-implementation filing requirement for specified investments. It would streamline the minister's ability to investigate national security reviews of investments and strengthen penalties for offenders. It would create regulatory power to generate a list of national security industries where automatic proposed acquisitions would be reviewed for national security harm, and it would provide ministerial authority to impose interim conditions and accept mitigation undertakings.
The bill would remove the Governor in Council, replacing it with the minister in making an order for further national security review, and involve the Governor in Council in the results of the national security review only if the investment is found, after investigation, to be injurious to national security. It supposedly would improve coordination with international partners and strengthen rules for the protection of information in judicial review proceedings.
In essence, this bill would give the Minister of Industry more time and authority to assess foreign transactions that might compromise national security, by removing the Governor in Council from the initial process while also making more severe the penalties for violating the Investment Canada Act. This, on its face, is beneficial and necessary, but there are several gaps that need to be addressed, which I will outline later.
Threats to our national security and sovereignty come in a dizzying array with regard to scope and creativity. Today, I want to focus on threats to our national security via our economy by investment from actors with malicious intent. There is just cause to update and strengthen the Investment Canada Act to prevent such threats or, at the very least, reduce the number of threatening actions made to Canada's economy and national security via investment. There exists a scary number of examples wherein Canada's national security was jeopardized due to a lack of due diligence on behalf of the industry minister with regard to foreign direct investment.
The industry minister's 2021 mandate letter directed the minister to do the following:
Contribute to broader efforts to promote economic security and combat foreign interference by reviewing and modernizing the Investment Canada Act to strengthen the national security review process and better identify and mitigate...security threats from foreign investment.
The keywords here are “better identify and mitigate...security threats”. There is ample evidence to show why the Prime Minister so directed the industry minister, as the Liberal record on allowing bad actors to invest in Canadian companies, and therefore our intellectual property and data, is rather horrifying.
In 2017, the Minister of Industry failed to request a full national security review of the acquisition of a B.C.-based telecommunications company, Norsat International, and its subsidiary, Sinclair Technologies, by China-based Hytera Communications, which is partially owned by the People's Republic of China. The Chinese government owns about 10% of Hytera Communications through an investment fund.
The United States, our largest and most important trading partner, blacklisted Hytera in 2021. Its Federal Communications Commission stated that the company “pose[s] an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons”. Sales and import of Hytera equipment are banned in the U.S. as a result, and our industry minister let this company, with its ties to the Chinese ruling Communist Party, buy a Canadian company.
It gets better, or should I say, it gets worse. Hytera Communications is also facing 21 charges in an American espionage case. The United States Department of Justice is accusing the firm of conspiring to steal trade secrets from Motorola. We know this tactic has been used before by the Chinese government, and yet our industry minister okayed a sale of a Canadian company right to it.
In 2019, Manitoba-based Tantalum Mining Corp. of Canada Limited, also known as Tanco, was purchased by the Chinese company Sinomine Resources. The purchase was approved by the Liberals with no national security review. The mine produces lithium and more than 65% of the world's cesium, which is used in drilling applications, as well as Canada's largest deposit of tantalum, which is used in electronics.
Sinomine was recently ordered by the government, in November, to divest itself of its investment in Power Metals Corp, a different mining exploration firm in Vancouver, but the government was apparently totally fine with its continued ownership of the Tanco mine and its critical minerals operations, as its divestment order said nothing about it.
In 2020, our Department of Global Affairs awarded a $6.8-million contract to state-owned, China-based Nuctech, which was founded by the son of the former Chinese Communist Party secretary general. That is $6.8 million of Canadian taxpayer money basically going directly into the Chinese Communist Party's pockets, along with precious data.
As John Ivison wrote for the National Post in 2020, “Nuctech is known as the 'Huawei of airport security'”. The contract was to supply security equipment for 170 Canadian embassies, consulates and high commissions around the globe. A security industry source told Ivison for the story that he was concerned there were now “significant pieces of Chinese technology sitting in every embassy” and that the contract included delivery, installation, operator training and software.
For the same article, Guy Saint-Jacques, a former Canadian ambassador in Beijing, explained that the Chinese business strategy overseas is to win market share and, once dominant, dictate prices, illustrating that not only are there security concerns with these problematic investments, but there are also long-term economic implications. We cannot continue to let China and other actors with malicious intent interfere with Canada's economy and national security, even if they do offer the lowest prices for the service.
That said, the pattern of allowing risky investments without full security reviews continues. It was apparently briefly acknowledged in 2021, with the industry minister updating and enhancing guidelines for national security reviews of transactions involving critical minerals and state-owned enterprises in March of that year. However, 2022 saw a number of lapses, even with this enhanced protocol.
In January 2022, the minister failed to follow his own updated guidelines when he fast-tracked the takeover of the Canadian lithium company Neo Lithium Corp. by Chinese state-owned Zijin Mining, again, without a national security review.
Wesley Wark, a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in international affairs and intelligence gathering, told the industry and technology committee, while studying the takeover after the fact, that it was a mistake. The value of the transaction was close to a billion dollars.
Then, in November 2022, the minister ordered three Chinese companies to divest their ownership of three critical minerals firms, but Neo Lithium was not included.
In December 2022, possibly the worst offence, the RCMP awarded a contract to supply sensitive hardware for its communications systems to Sinclair Technologies, which, members will recall, was sold to Hytera Communications, the Chinese company partially owned by the Communist Party and blacklisted in the U.S.
It was also revealed in December of that year that the Canada Border Services Agency has been using communications equipment and technology from Hytera. A CBC story says that Public Services and Procurement Canada did not take into consideration the security concerns about Sinclair and its ownership during the bidding process. The difference between that and Quebec-based Comprod's offer was $60,000. The Liberals love to hand out money left and right, but they could not spend $60,000 to keep our security hardware domestically sourced and provide Canadians with jobs while we are at it.
As we can see, the bill is sorely needed, but there are a few areas for improvement within the bill itself.
I do not like the part that gets rid of the Governor in Council approval and gives power just to the minister. I think that should be fixed. The legislation should also consider updating the act's definition of a state-owned enterprise, which is now too vague. There is no provision to block any subsequent takeover by a state-owned enterprise of a previous Investment Canada Act-approved acquisition.
It is my hope that the government learns from its mistakes, listens to the opposition parties and experts, and gets this legislation right. We cannot keep selling off parts of our economy, national security and precious resources to bad actors.
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Madam Speaker, I will let the member opposite continue on this line with my question, which has to do with our Five Eyes partners. They clearly said they did not want Huawei to have any access to the 5G networks in Canada, but it took the government two years before it came to that decision. Meanwhile, Bell and Telus implemented Huawei's 4G across the nation.
What mechanisms are present in the bill that the member believes will help us stand better with our Five Eyes partners?
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