Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
This is an important study and one that should be a priority for this committee. I'll start off by saying a member previously made a comment regarding lithium carbonate. It should be noted that this can also be chemically converted to lithium hydroxide and there is high demand for this. There are articles online stating that the demand is increasing due to its use in batteries, so that comment wasn't relevant to this conversation.
When I was last on this committee, one of the final studies we completed was on the Investment Canada Act. This recent purchase of Neo Lithium by a foreign state-owed enterprise and the federal government's failure to do a security review should prompt a study. We need to hear from the ministers responsible as well as CSIS and department officials.
I recall that during the Investment Canada Act study we had Tim Hahlweg from CSIS, and I questioned him regarding the risks associated with Canadian data going to a foreign state-owned enterprise. He also touched on what he called “potential risks...to...control over strategic sectors”. I think we can all agree that, with the increased production of green technology, Canada's mining sector, including its procurement of lithium, is a strategic sector. A national security review would have considered various things in this regard, including how this would affect Canadian intellectual property. The government failed to conduct this review.
If we also consider principles of reciprocity, which were brought up by Professor Charles Burton in this study, the question of why the Liberal government allowed a foreign state-owned enterprise to purchase a Canadian natural resource company without a diligent review needs to be raised.
During the previous study it became very evident that the current thresholds in the Investment Canada Act were not adequate. This also flows into the recommendations made by the committee to the government early in 2021, which called on the government to have automatic reviews of all purchases of Canadian companies by state-owned enterprises to protect strategic sectors such as natural resources and to block any transaction that would undermine our national security by transferring sensitive assets. Despite these recommendations being made to the government nearly a year ago, the sale of Neo Lithium appears to show that the government ignored all of these recommendations, which this same committee agreed on.
The intellectual property concern has been reiterated recently, in this specific case by experts like Wesley Wark from the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and to frame this in the context of our North American supply chain. Jeff Kucharski, an energy policy professor at Royal Roads University and fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, wrote in the Toronto Star recently calling the government's lack of national security review “bizarre” with it undermining the ability to strengthen Canadian supply chains for critical minerals.
We heard many other examples in the last study, and I believe, based on those concerns then and the concerns that we're hearing now, this should be studied promptly. I'm hoping that all members of the committee will support this motion.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.