Thank you, Marc-André.
Thank you to the committee and to the chair.
On behalf of the Canadian Bar Association's foreign investment review committee, we offer two primary conclusions in respect of the reform proposals put forward in the context of the current pandemic.
I will speak to the first conclusion relating to national security reviews, and my colleague Michael Kilby will speak to the second conclusion, which relates to national benefit reviews.
Our first conclusion is that the government has no practical need to adjust the ICA's national security review regime in response to the COVID-19 crisis, given the tremendous powers already available to the government under that regime and the April 18, 2020 policy statement articulating its intention to utilize its existing powers to more closely scrutinize certain investments under the ICA.
The ICA authorizes the government to review any foreign investment by a non-Canadian involving a Canadian business on national security grounds where the government believes that an investment may be injurious to national security.
The national security provisions of the ICA do not specify threshold requirements based on the size of the target, the transaction nor the extent of the interest being acquired by the foreign investor, nor is the scope of activities that may implicate national security defined. This means that the ICA's national security provisions apply to an extremely broad array of investments, including minority investments across a wide variety of industries at the government's discretion.
The April 18 policy statement amplifies the existing discretion and the latitude available to the government to assess transactions that may be injurious to Canada's national security and explicitly includes opportunistic investments such as investments in public health-related businesses, investments in businesses that supply critical goods or services, none of which is defined, and investments by state-owned enterprises or private investors influenced by state-owned enterprises.
Under the current legislation, the government can issue a notice initiating a national security review process at any time from when it becomes aware of an investment until 45 days after receipt of the investor's filing under the Investment Canada Act, or 45 days after it learns of the investment if no filing is required under the legislation. In sum, the current legislation provides the government and its intelligence partners a significant amount of time to determine whether the investment raises potential concerns, and in such cases, has broad discretion to extend its review and ultimately mitigate any identified risk or block the investment altogether.
The April 18 policy statement articulates the government's intention to utilize these tools fully in the COVID-19 environment.
For these reasons, there is no practical need for any immediate adjustment to the ICA in response to the potential threats arising out of the current environment.
I will now turn it over to Mike to talk about our conclusion with respect to net benefit reviews.