Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for being here.
It's an interesting topic. It's something the industry committee first delved into back in 2002-2004 with China Minmetals. We had no national security screen at that time with regard to oversight of the Investment Canada Act. In fact, there were over 9,000 files, and not one had actually been reviewed or taken down from the acquisition process at that time.
Today, we have this discussion. We need to actually characterize what people can relate to. There was Rona. There you go. How well did that work out for Canada? Lowe's took it over and closed stores, so there was less competition for consumers.
We had Zellers as a retail operation. Target came in from the United States. Zellers was actually making a profit and paid its workers more than its competition. Then Target withdrew from Canada, closed Zellers, and we had less competition.
Eaton's was taken over by Sears. We know how Sears ended up in Canada, actually committing pension fraud against workers, which to this day the government has not addressed, as this unfunded liability has been borne basically by working-class people at their expense. Again, that was allowed to take place under the Investment Canada Act.
Others were Alcan, Inco, Falconbridge, Stelco and Electro-Motive in London. There were issues related to MacDonald, Dettwiler, and we fought and stopped that. Even the Aecon construction company in Canada was proposed to be taken over by Chinese construction firms at that time.
Ironically, where I am, where I've been fighting since 1998 for a new border crossing, Aecon would have been denied building the new Gordie Howe International Bridge because the United States didn't want the Chinese government involved. We are actually building that crossing right now, which is responsible in my area for 40% of the daily trade between Canada and the United States, about $1 billion and about 10,000 trucks per day.
Had Aecon been taken over by the Chinese at that time, it would have made the project or bid null and void, reducing it to basically a competitive process of one bidding agent left over from the three that were tendered. Again, competition at the expense....
I think about the fact that we have our Canada Pension Plan as well when we talk about not being able to say no to anything because it's a laissez-faire market and we have no real interest in determining winners or losers. I've heard that terminology before, and it hasn't really worked out very well for Canadians.
I think about our Canada Pension Plan, which has invested in private health care facilities in Ontario for seniors, making a profit at a time when we needed the military to come in and clean up things there. I think about British Columbia, where right now Anbang, which the Chinese state government really owns, is treating and caring for our seniors because Canadians can't afford to do so ourselves, or we've left it open to them to decide as to those practices.
I find this discussion void of the real consequences in the employment aspect and also the statutory importance of having a strategy to go along with competing in the world.
It is interesting, because Canada is one of the few states that doesn't' have sectoral strategies. If you look at Kia Motors, which competes here in Canada, and Volkswagen and others in the automotive sector where I come from, you see that they are heavily subsidized by state governments, either through direct investment or through their pensions, and there are also industrial strategies. In fact, even Mexico, which recently signed an agreement with the United States, and you could even argue Trump with regard to his behaviour concerning re-industrialization, have moved national strategies and resources, and somehow we're supposed to just forget all of that and look at the part coming in.
I do want to pose one question with regard to this discussion, though, and it is to any of the witnesses who have come before us here today. We are talking about China in particular, but what about private equity firms? Is there an interest out there to actually have some public disclosure when Canadians invest? Should there not be public disclosure by municipalities, provinces and federal governments? In particular, with regard to ownership, tax deductions, credits for innovation and research, as well as direct subsidies, and that includes reducing corporate taxes, do we not have an interest to guarantee that those companies at least have some domestic control, and shouldn't we provide that screen for private equity firms as well as the state of China?
If anybody wants to answer, I'd be happy to listen. If not, then I can continue this, because this is simply unacceptable. It's absurd that we are the only country, I think, in the industrialized world that has this type of a laissez-faire policy in place and we basically say, “Good luck. It's too complicated. You sort it out.”
