Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable members. Thank you for inviting me. I'm happy to appear before you today.
I hope to keep my remarks very short, as many great points have already been made and I don't want to repeat them.
I come as a senior partner of the law firm of Torys and a practitioner in foreign investment law. I will not make any remarks on the technical implications of the amendments, as the CBA has ably dealt with this. I want to come at this from a different perspective, as a lawyer who has counselled clients on the technicalities of compliance with the Investment Canada Act, and also as a lawyer who has worked in the United Arab Emirates, for example—even today—with major Canadian institutions that are actively seeking capital and partnerships internationally.
It's also relevant that I have recently published a study with the Institute for Research on Public Policy, which you may or may not have seen, called “Foreign Direct Investment and the National Interest: A Way Forward”. As I look at these amendments, I see them against a background of what it is we're trying to accomplish with foreign investment in Canada. This should inform how we are amending our act and our policies as we try to balance these two key objectives: furthering the national interest—which others have spoken to—in seeking capital, and ensuring that we have competition for capital in Canada.
While we may not need money from all of the sources around the world, we want to ensure that Canadians have the fullest competition to obtain capital. We want low-cost capital as well as competitive and enduring businesses, both for the sake of business owners and those who work in those businesses, which propel our economy. We want investment that is going to be of benefit to our country. That's something we shouldn't be shy about. We should insist on that, and our act should work in a way that continues to seek those objectives. Specifically, for example, in this case we want to, rightly, in many instances, scrutinize and carefully review acquisitions from state-owned enterprises.
There are a couple of points I would like to emphasize. First, related to my earlier point, the reality in the modern world, which I see on a daily basis with clients, is that we need access to capital pools that are in the hands of what we would term unfamiliar players and new institutions. These include countries we haven't traditionally done business in and institutions such as state-owned enterprises. That is a matter of fact. We need to be very careful of how we craft the rules for ensuring our access to that capital and competition for that capital in our country.
We also have another dynamic, which is something to be proud of: for the first time in a long time, or maybe ever, we have a group of very significant Canadian institutions, such as our pension funds and others, that have now grown to be meaningful players internationally. When we craft our rules, we need to think about how they project out into the world to ensure that we get reciprocal treatment and that we continue to be leaders in promoting free and open capital markets for our own benefit. When we look at how we are going to craft our rules on state-owned enterprises, and we have words like “indirect” or “influence”, we need to make sure we're precise. What we don't want to do is set a precedent globally for someone to say, for example, that our pension funds are these types of state-owned enterprises that people should be wary of because they have indirect relations with our governments and public institutions.
This idea of reciprocity is something that's very important today, and we need to look at it both from a defensive perspective and from an offensive perspective, and ensure we get the full benefit of foreign investment rules in our country.
In addition, another point, a general point that relates to the amendments on national security—and just to echo some of the previous comments—is that clarity is important. International, sophisticated players can understand a “no” or a prohibition. What's very difficult is when there is a lack of clarity. A lack of clarity, in the modern world, goes to timing. It's not just relating to whether, substantively, your transaction would pass a certain test. If it will take an indeterminate period of time, again, those markets may not tolerate that type of indefinite timeline. It's in our interest to ensure there is certainty on that front.
I look forward to your questions. I won't elaborate any further.
Finally, we just want to ensure that we understand that in the modern world today, what we say, our actions, and what we project do have a magnifying impact when you're viewing it from the outside in. You can have things that create a greater chilling effect in investment than are necessarily in our national interest.
Thank you.