First of all, the issue of the Privacy Act is very important. At the University of Toronto, we do a lot of work on outsourcing, the whole idea being that when you have these U.S.-affiliated companies getting access to servers, and so on, with Canadian information on them, all of that can be transmitted to the U.S. government. There are lots of issues of privacy with that. It is something that we would need to look at very, very carefully, the idea being that an American company could buy up a Canadian company and this would compromise the Privacy Act. That would put a lot of Canadians at risk, and I think it's something that we need to think seriously about.
But the other thing I would say is that we shouldn't think about all investment coming into Canada as just being U.S. investment. It's a big world out there, and when you look at the share of investment coming into Canada, increasingly it's coming from countries other than the United States.
The other thing I would say is that when a foreign company comes into Canada, they're coming into Canada to buy an asset to maximize its value. They're not simply going to buy an asset in Canada and somehow just strip it down and then move away. Why would they do that? They're going to take that asset and operate it in the most efficient way. If the most efficient way for them is to gut it and take everything to the United States, then I don't see that happening.
What I see happening is foreign companies coming into Canada, participating in this sector, and enhancing our access to capital and technology—because foreign companies get access to technology through their networks—and as a result, the Canadian economy is going to become more competitive. I should say that industries that have more foreign participation in them are more productive than industries that do not.
Thank you.