Well, you see, when people apply to be licensees, etc., they don't necessarily know whether they will succeed and what the final structure will be, so to pre-clear them is very difficult. That's why the government adopts the perfectly sensible approach of saying, “Here are the conditions, and if you're successful, you have to be Canadian controlled”.
I don't think there was anything wrong with the way they approached it. The problem was that the initial decision.... I don't know when it was made or on what basis it was made. They would have had the same facts before them; I can't tell.... The process, as you know, is not transparent, and as for the materials they filed with Industry Canada to get the initial permission to bid, I have not seen them, so I don't know. I can only speak of what they put in front of us.
They came before us and said, “We are now set up and we want to operate”. They said, “This is how we're going to run ourselves and this is where our money comes from, and this is our technology and where it comes from, and this is where our the trademark comes from”. It's all the same process, they said, and they said that they thought they were in Canadian control. On the basis of the facts they presented to us, on which there was heavy cross-examination, we came to the conclusion that no, they were not, but several times during the hearing we asked them to make changes.
They did make quite a few changes and considerably restructured the thing. They came before us with two companies, and by the end of it, there was only one company. The two were merged, the voting structure was changed, and so on. They made considerable changes, but they did not make the essential ones that we felt were necessary.
As I mentioned, I wish I had had the power to give them conditional approval. Since we didn't have it, we said no, but we made it quite clear what they would have to do in order to come onside.