Thank you for the question. It's an excellent question.
I'm not sure I have a good answer for you as to why we have failed to do very many national security reviews in the past. I think the best answer I can give is that it wasn't part of the tradition. It wasn't part of the way in which we thought about foreign direct investment. We wanted to maintain an image for Canada as a country open to foreign direct investment, which we saw as important to our economic prosperity. Although that still holds, what has changed is the geopolitical and economic security environment in which we now operate, so whatever our past calculations in that regard, I think we have to take a different approach in the future.
It is also, I must say, to be fair to the officials involved, a resource-intensive and very complex undertaking to come up with an appropriate intelligence assessment on these investments. I think, to be frank, that Canada has not invested a lot of resources in what I would call “economic intelligence”. That hasn't been a priority for our intelligence community. We may need to pivot to that enterprise more appropriately in the future, but I don't think we have a lot of resources that we can devote to it at the moment.