44th Parl. 1st Sess.
November 6, 2023 11:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I know the member to be a good person and an honest person, but he is saying that we have agreed to something that we have not agreed to. I do not think that is appropriate. It has been very clear that we have not agreed, particularly on the amendment to clause 15.
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- Nov/6/23 12:31:17 p.m.
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That is debate, I believe, unless we could have some clarification that it actually went against the rules.
Continuing with questions and comments, the hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader has the floor.
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Mr. Speaker, there is no doubt that there is a genuine consensus of agreement in the legislation and the principles of the legislation, yet the Conservatives continue to want to prevent the House of Commons from being able to pass legislation with all forms of filibustering. A good example of that is Bill C-56, something that we debated earlier today as part of a private member's bill where members on all sides were talking about the importance of competition. However, Bill C-56 is yet another victim of Conservative filibustering.
I wonder if my friend and colleague could provide his thoughts in regard to the filibustering that takes place, which hurts Canadians.
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Mr. Speaker, this will allow me to respond to the point of order that was made. There was agreement by all parties on 11 significant amendments to the bill that we are talking about.
I value the contributions of my Conservative colleagues. I value them. That is why I went to the committee. We took on border amendments. We agreed that the best way to have good legislation in this country is to have work being done at committee, to listen to witnesses and work together. They know me. I am a very open-minded person. We accepted not one but 11 significant amendments to this bill. Everyone agreed that those were the significant amendments we needed to move forward. That was the agreement of the committee.
I think the question of the member is relevant. Once that was all done, after 44 witnesses, 20 hours of work at committee and 20 hours of time used in the House, there comes a time when people at home will say we need to move on and vote. That is exactly what we are asking for today with this motion.
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Mr. Speaker, it is nothing but a bunch of myths from the Liberal minister. He bragged earlier that he had dropped the threshold; he did not. I brought that motion in, and Liberal MPs voted against it. I brought in the amendment to the committee that put bribery and corruption in. Liberal MPs voted against it. The only reason it is through is because the opposition put it in.
The whole point of report stage is to allow for further amendments. The minister has ignored for a half hour the call to say yes or no to whether he thinks cabinet should be eliminated from the process of reviewing foreign investments. His bill would remove cabinet from that process and put it solely in the minister's hands.
Why, for a half hour, has he decided not to answer the question? Will Liberals support our amendment at report stage to return cabinet decision-making to the Investment Canada Act, yes or no?
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Mr. Speaker, the member knows how much I like him and, I will say in front of everyone in this House, his contributions. I may have had half an hour, but he had 20 hours of work at the committee to put forward his amendment. During these 20 hours, not one but 11 significant amendments were adopted by everyone. This was the Liberals, the NDP, the Bloc and the Conservatives. They had 20 hours in committee to do that, and they came and said they agreed this was the best way forward for this bill.
I welcome his contribution. I thank him for what he does in making sure he improves legislation. However, after 20 hours, someone at home would think that they must have done the work they needed to do. What we are saying today is we need to vote. That is what the motion is about today.
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Mr. Speaker, he still has not answered the question. Yes or no, will he vote to return cabinet decision-making to the Investment Canada process? Why does he think he is so important he is allowed to ignore his colleagues in that role in making those decisions?
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Mr. Speaker, yes or no, will my colleague vote for the motion? That is the real question, because they had 20 hours of debate. The good people in his riding are wondering. If he agrees, how will he vote? Like I said, there is a time for debate and there is time for action. The time for action has come now. This is about national security. This in the interest of Canadians. I want every member of this House to support the motion.
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- Nov/6/23 12:36:12 p.m.
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It is my duty to interrupt the proceedings at this time and put forthwith the question on the motion now before the House.
If a member participating in person wishes that the motion be carried on division or if a member of a recognized party participating in person wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
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- Nov/6/23 12:37:30 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we would humbly like a recorded division.
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- Nov/6/23 12:37:34 p.m.
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I declare the motion carried.
I wish to inform the House that because of the proceedings on the time allocation motion, Government Orders will be extended by 30 minutes.
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Mr. Speaker, I am happy to rise today to speak to Bill C-34, which would update the Investment Canada Act. This act is designed to do two main things. The first is to ensure that foreign investments in Canada have a net benefit to Canadians. The second is to ensure that foreign investments are not detrimental to our national security.
Many Canadians, especially Canadians of my age, might know this act better by its former name, The Foreign Investment Review Act. In its early days in the 1970s, it was brought in to deal with a rash of foreign buyouts, mainly American, of Canadian companies.
The Foreign Investment Review Agency approved about 90% of the transactions it dealt with, but was criticized by both Liberals and Conservatives for actually doing its job by blocking some proposals that did not show a benefit to Canadians.
Therefore, Brian Mulroney brought in the Investment Canada Act in 1984. He replaced the Foreign Investment Review Agency with Investment Canada, saying that he wanted to welcome foreign investment. True to his word, under his government, Investment Canada did not block a single foreign investment transaction, not one. The Liberal governments that followed Mulroney, under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin, had the same record, not one application blocked.
The Harper government was a different story. Harper blocked the sale of British Columbia-based Macdonald, Dettwiler to the American company Alliant based on both financial and critical technology arguments.
On the other hand, in 2012, the Harper government allowed the $15-billion sale of Canada oil company Nexen to the China National Offshore Oil Company, owned by the Chinese government, and the $6-billion sale of Progress Energy to Malaysia-based Petronas. However, the same day, Harper changed the Investment Canada Act to block state-owned foreign investment in Canadian oil and gas companies, essentially closing the barn door after the horses had left.
Therefore, legislation regarding regulating foreign takeovers of Canadian companies has changed from time to time over the past decades. Foreign investment trends have changed as well. The share of U.S. investment in Canada has declined over the past few decades, but it still leads the pack followed by the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Japan, China, Germany, Brazil, France and Bermuda, although, I suspect the high placement of Luxembourg and Bermuda reflects more where Canadian companies are hiding their profits than real sources of investment.
However, it is clear that we need to keep up with the times in regulating foreign investment, and Bill C-34 is another example of that.
Information and data are the new oil, and earlier versions of the Investment Canada Act were essentially blind to that. The bill before us introduces a pre-implementation filing requirement for certain investments to give earlier visibility to situations where there is a risk that a foreign investor would gain access to sensitive assets or information immediately on closing.
I have talked to numerous tech companies over the past few years. One story I hear repeatedly is that small Canadian tech companies work hard to develop a new technology, say in hydrogen energy development or AI advances. However, when it comes to expand their companies to really get their product to market, they need investment. Too often in the Canadian tech ecosystem, these companies simply get bought out by bigger companies from the United States, Europe or China. With those sales go the intellectual property that represents the core of their company's value.
The present version of the Investment Canada Act allows companies to report takeovers after the fact. However, if critical intellectual property is involved, it is usually too late to stop the transfer of that information, if we find out about the transaction 30 days later, for instance. It is not like the old days when the main value of a company was in the factories it owned. This new pre-implementation filing could help put a stop to that where necessary.
There are several other improvements that provide more flexibility for the minister to act and better manage the entire process.
What would make the act even better? First, the act should mandate the review of an acquisition by a state-owned enterprise of a company previously reviewed by the ICA, and I would like to spend some time on a story that illustrates why this is needed.
There is a company called Retirement Concepts that owns and operates a number of seniors residences in British Columbia, long-term care homes. One of them is the Summerland Seniors Village just outside the federal riding I represent but within the provincial riding I live in. When I first sought to enter politics 10 years ago, I was involved in a provincial election in that riding.
The Summerlands Seniors Village was involved in a tragic story of a local family that lost both its mother and its father in 2012 to poor care and accidents. I met with members of the family and heard the heart-wrenching story of neglect that had taken the lives of their parents.
After that incident, the provincial government demanded that Retirement Concepts hire more staff, but managers claimed that no one was applying. I am guessing that a combination of low wages and overworked conditions had a lot to do with that.
In 2016, Chinese insurance giant Anbang, then a privately held company, bought Retirement Concepts, a transaction that was reviewed and okayed by the federal government's investment review process. Less than a year after that purchase was okayed, the Chinese government seized the Anbang company and jailed its chairman for fraud. Perhaps it knew something that the Canadian government missed when that review was carried out.
Suddenly, we have the Chinese government owning a company that is one of the largest providers of long-term care in Canada and certainly the largest in B.C.. Not only is it one of the largest providers of long-term care, it is known to provide very poor care at times for our seniors.
In fact, in 2020, the provincial government in British Columbia had to seize management control of four care homes run by Retirement Concepts because of the continuing problems with poor care. It returned that control just over a year later, but it is an indication of the general lack of priority Retirement Concepts had placed on the care of seniors.
At present, there are no provisions in the Investment Canada Act that would allow Investment Canada or the minister to be able to review the subsequent acquisition by a state-owned enterprise of an ICA-approved takeover or merger by a foreign private company. We have to change this.
The NDP put forward an amendment that would allow for the review of a takeover by a state-owned enterprise. This can be done by establishing the power to require a mandatory divestment of all Canadian assets by entities in these specific circumstances.
As an aside, in the case of long-term care homes, the NDP is very much in favour of a move to a future where seniors' care is given the same respect that all health care gets, a future where no long-term care homes are owned by private companies that put profit ahead of the well-being of our seniors.
This is an example of where we could and should take a big step in that direction.
Another factor to consider in investment review is to prevent the loss of publicly funded research and development from leaving the country, resulting in the loss of jobs and, basically, the theft of taxpayer dollars.
A company called Nemak received $3 million dollars from the government's automotive supplier innovation program. However, in 2020, Nemak closed its plant in Windsor, where those funds had been used to create new products for General Motors, and transferred that technology and those jobs to its operations in Mexico.
An NDP amendment, passed in committee, would allow for the review of a foreign takeover to consider the intellectual property whose development was funded by the federal government and to issue remedies to retain the benefits in Canada. Therefore, a situation like that of Nemak would not happen again.
I do not have time today to go over all the improvements this bill would bring to the foreign investment space in Canada or to go over all the improvements that we had hoped it would bring but fell short.
In this new world, where ideas and data are often more valuable than the natural resources we have so long relied on for our wealth, we need a new regulatory framework to protect our industries, our workers and our companies. Bill C-34 is a step in that direction.
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Mr. Speaker, could the member provide his thoughts in regard to the idea that this is a modernization? It has been a number of years since the legislation has been changed to the degree that is being proposed today. Because of technological changes over the past decade, changes to the legislation are badly needed. That is one reason why we hope to see Bill C-34 pass as quickly as possible.
Could he comment on the importance of getting this passed before Christmas?
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Mr. Speaker, as I mentioned in my speech, things have really changed since this was last updated in, I think, 2009 or 2012. Before that, when I was young, this whole regulatory system was brought in because manufacturing plants were largely going south of the border.
Things have changed. Canada is a leader in several aspects of real high-tech research and development. I mentioned hydrogen. There is fusion and AI that we hear a lot about. These are things that move very rapidly, and almost all the value in the company is not in the offices it has or its labs but in ideas and intellectual property. This is something that has really changed. One thing we need to do is change the regulations to protect that from leaving Canada.
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Mr. Speaker, I was interested in the member's speech, particularly because 30-year NDP House leader Stanley Knowles would not have been impressed with the NDP voting for closure and eliminating debate in the House once again.
Aside from that, this report stage debate is specifically about our amendment to the bill to return the cabinet decision-making process to the beginning and the end decisions on whether an acquisition by a foreign entity poses a national security review.
The hon. member's colleague from Windsor West has done some good work on this bill as well. Will he and his party be supporting our amendment at report stage?
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Mr. Speaker, I think there is something to be said for both methods, whether we simply require ministerial decision-making or we want it to go to cabinet. Having the minister being the decision-maker in this case adds some nimbleness to it, and there is something to be said about nimbleness and a quick decision. Some of these transactions are happening very quickly in the financial markets. We all know how quickly they can happen.
I have not been part of the committee discussions, so I do not want to presume to say where we will end up on this. However, I can see both sides to that story. I will wait to see what happens.
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Mr. Speaker, I see that the NDP has once again decided to support a government gag order. I find this odd because, in general, the role of the opposition parties is to challenge the government. Their role is to try and determine whether the government is doing a good job, to ask questions, to try to improve things.
We get the impression that the NDP is just rubber-stamping everything that the Liberals come up with. I question the usefulness of having a party like that in the House of Commons, if it votes in favour of everything the government tables.
Is there any critical thinking happening at all on the NDP side, or are the New Democrats completely blinded by a fear of ending up in an election or holding the Liberals to account?
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Mr. Speaker, if the member had been concentrating and looking at the past voting records in this Parliament, he could see the NDP voting against the government on a number of occasions. We are still strongly debating with the government on issues, and this bill is an example of that. We thought the bill did not come up to the standards we would have liked. We put forward several good ideas for amendments in this bill, and some were accepted.
We are always focused on improving the lives of Canadians and improving the field for Canadian businesses. That is what we concentrate on. When it is time to move on, it is time to move on. We see parties such as the Conservative Party do nothing but block everything. We have had three concurrence motions in the past week, which are just designed to waste time. We have to move along and get things done. This bill is very much needed, and we are happy to support its movement through Parliament.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak to Bill C-34, an act to amend the Investment Canada Act, at report stage. I will get into the particulars of the bill shortly, but before I do, let me say that in a little more than an hour and a half, Liberal members across the way will have a choice. They can vote for our common-sense Conservative motion to axe the tax on all home heating, or they can do the bidding of their boss, the Prime Minister, and sell out their constituents.
These are Liberal MPs from Ontario, Alberta, Manitoba and British Columbia. We will see whose side they are on, because their colleagues from Atlantic Canada, including the member for Avalon, received an exemption for Atlantic Canadians on home heating oil. However, it seems that all other Liberal MPs are so useless that their constituents, including my constituents, Albertans, have received nothing. We will see whose side Liberal MPs, including the member for Edmonton Centre and the member for Calgary Skyview, are on very shortly.
With respect to this legislation, when it was presented in the House at second reading stage, it was a modest bill. It was, frankly, inadequate in terms of strengthening the foreign investment review process, which takes into account the net benefit for Canada, as well as national security considerations. However, the good news is that the bill has been significantly improved thanks to four Conservative amendments that were adopted at the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology, although opposed by the Liberals.
I would submit that the most important of those amendments is to require a mandatory security review for investments by foreign state-owned enterprises in which Canada does not have a trading agreement with the countries.
This legislation marks the first major revamp of the Investment Canada Act since 2009. It goes without saying the foreign investment environment has changed considerably in that time, with foreign bad actors, including Beijing, posing an increased threat to our security and sovereignty.
PRC firms work closely with Beijing's military and intelligence apparatuses to gain information about foreign companies, as well as to acquire their technology. Professor Balding, who testified at the industry committee in 2020, indicated that PRC firms are actually given a list each year of foreign assets to acquire, underscoring the threat posed by Beijing.
The fact that we have this increasing threat demonstrates that the Investment Canada Act is long overdue for an update. However, for the past eight years, the Prime Minister has been asleep at the switch, while Beijing has attacked our sovereignty, security and democracy on his watch.
Beijing has used its embassy and consulates to interfere in our elections and to target sitting members of Parliament for daring to speak up and call out Beijing's egregious human rights violations, including the genocide being perpetrated against Uyghur Muslims as we speak. This regime has set up illegal police stations to harass, intimidate and repatriate Chinese Canadians, and it is spreading disinformation on a mass scale to divide Canadians.
In the face of that, the response of the Prime Minister has been to do nothing, to turn a blind eye. Indeed, the only concrete measure that the Prime Minister took was to expel one Beijing diplomat, but only after he got caught for keeping the member for Wellington—Halton Hills in the dark about how he and his family were targeted by a diplomat at Beijing's Toronto consulate.
For the past eight years, Beijing has effectively been given the green light to acquire vast amounts of farmland. It has gained a foothold with respect to critical infrastructure and strategic resources, including minerals. Even worse than that, we have a government, under the Prime Minister's watch, that has refused to undertake national security reviews and has given the green light to Beijing-controlled enterprises to invest in Canada and acquire Canadian companies, to the detriment of Canada's national security. In so doing, it has also caused irreparable damage to Canada's reputation among our Five Eyes allies.
One egregious example of that, and I stress that there are many examples I could cite, was when the Beijing-controlled Hytera sought to acquire the B.C. communications technology company Norsat, which worked with National Defence Canada, Public Safety Canada and the Pentagon. Our U.S. ally said to put a pause on this takeover by Hytera, but the Liberal minister of the day, in his infinite wisdom, ignored the U.S. and gave the green light without any security review.
Last year, Hytera was charged with 21 counts of espionage by the U.S. This underscores the degree of recklessness on the part of the government to give the green light, not to mention the damage it has done to our reputation with our most important ally, the United States.
As bad as that is, one would think that after a company such as Hytera was facing 21 espionage charges in the U.S., it would be enough for the government to decide not to do business with Hytera. However, one would be wrong; it was not enough for the current Liberals. Eight months later, the Liberals gave the green light for a contract with the RCMP to sell technology to protect sensitive RCMP communications equipment for espionage from a subsidiary of none other than Hytera, a company charged with 21 counts of espionage. One cannot make this stuff up. It is scandalous incompetence with real national security implications.
In 2020, to make it appear that he was actually taking Beijing's interference seriously, the minister of industry announced a policy of enhanced scrutiny for investments from foreign state-owned enterprises. No sooner had he announced the policy than he disregarded it, giving the green light to another Beijing state-owned enterprise to acquire a mining company that operates the largest lithium mine in Canada. Now, all that lithium is controlled by Beijing.
In closing, let me say that when it comes to protecting Canada's national security from authoritarian states such as Beijing, the government cannot be trusted. The good news, however, is that this bill would require the reckless government to undertake the security reviews that it should have taken but did not. On that basis, it is a much stronger bill going forward, thanks to the Conservatives and no thanks to the Liberals.
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