Thank you.
I again wish to place on the record that in submitting to the finance committee's request that I provide amendments, with the instruction to have one minute per amendment to present them, I'm in no way precluding my rights under those that any member of Parliament in my circumstances has at report stage. So I participate without prejudice.
I'm grateful for an opportunity to address the changes I'm proposing. We're now moving to division 6, the Investment Canada Act. I know other parties also have concerns. The first block of my amendments all address definitions found in clause 136. This of course is the attempt, the general effort, which I support, to provide a definition for “state-owned enterprise” and to further amend the definition of “Canadian”.
All of my amendments within the Investment Canada Act go to two areas. One, which we'll get to later, is on some concerns that were raised by the competition subsection of the Canadian Bar Association about the way in which state-owned enterprises are valued compared to how WTO private investors are valued. But throughout this you'll also find a thread of concern about the national security implications of increased foreign investment in Canada, particularly by state-owned enterprises. In that, I would flag now for my friends in the Conservative Party that if you were willing to consider an amendment that comes up later, which is Green Party amendment 6, which deals directly with providing an actual definition of national security...when I speak to that, that's the one that I hope and pray you will actually consider, because I think it's important in the national interest.
Speaking to the amendments that I'm presenting as a block right now, they all relate to definitions. Under state-owned enterprise, Green Party amendment 2 attempts to insert the notion that when we're looking at state-owned enterprises of governments that are obviously not Canadian, we're looking at governments particularly that are:
pursuing political or economic objectives that are potentially injurious to Canada's national security
The second amendment within this block, Mr. Chair, is Green Party amendment 3, which is looking at the extent of control. What we're doing here is taking the direction that we support in the government's efforts to provide specificity in this area, but we're tightening the amendment and making the definitions more stringent to reduce the level of ministerial discretion. We are calling on the minister in our amendment to provide guidelines that would be specific to examples of where a foreign government would be considered to have sufficient influence or direction over an entity to make it a state-owned enterprise.
Lastly, Mr. Chairman, it's looking at influence and direction of state-owned enterprises, again tightening definitions.
I hope these will be considered favourably by the committee.