Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'll start with Professor Houlden.
You came to speak to the Sherwood Park Rotary Club, which I was a part of eight or nine years ago. You probably don't remember, but I want to thank you for being engaged with our community back in my constituency.
I want to probe a little bit some of the distinctions you made. I found it quite interesting that right now the Investment Canada Act looks at dollar value and generally at state-owned enterprises. However, you made the point, I think quite well, that we might distinguish between state-owned enterprises that are of a certain scale and that we also might want to be particularly cautious about private but state-affiliated companies.
Could you talk about those private state-affiliated companies in the Chinese context? We know that virtually all private companies of a certain scale are expected to have party committees that are central to the decision-making of those companies, and that those companies are expected to be gathering IP that is useful to the military and partnering with the military on an ongoing basis. There really isn't the state-owned enterprise and the private sector distinction that we would see in other economies; there's a centralization of power and control. Maybe we should make other kinds of distinctions around whether IP is involved or not.
Could you speak about possible changes that we could make to the act that would bring in this concept of private state-affiliated companies?