I think Mr. Prentice has to stick by his decision. In fact, any uncertainty he's created in the market would only be exacerbated if he flipped back and allowed the sale to proceed.
What he has done is that he has made the right decision, but he's done so with an act that is not a 21st century investment act. Other developed countries this century have all had explicit national security exceptions built into their legislation. Mr. Prentice realized so this last fall, and set in process a set of deliberations that will eventually lead to an amendment to the act; but before those procedures could conclude, he found that he had to step in and read into the existing legislation an implicit national security test.
My point here is that the saga of MacDonald Dettwiler only underlines and emphasizes the imperative that we modernize our legislation, that we put in an explicit national security test so that in the future, if absolutely necessary, we can step in to block a sale without causing the kind of market uncertainty and political risk that we've seen created in the last couple of weeks. That's all.
If we do that, we should of course think about criteria we could then include in the act to guide the minister, and perhaps actually put in an independent body that could make recommendations to the minister with regard to any decision he has to make.
We used to have something called the Foreign Investment Review Agency. I know that name is problematic for some people today, but I would remind the members of this committee that FIRA approved 90% of the proposed sales that came before it, and it was criticized from both the nationalist left for not intervening enough, and by the business community on the other side for intervening perhaps a little bit too much. We don't necessarily need to replicate FIRA. We can learn from that experience and the criticisms it was subject to. But we do need something like that, particularly in the 21st century in our post-9/11 world, where national security occupies the much more prominent place it does today.