Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses. Those were all great and fascinating opening statements. As a Conservative, it's pretty hard to disagree with any of those statements. Obviously, we need enormous amounts of foreign direct investment to continue to grow our economy. However, we have also always had an eye, regardless of party, on understanding and making sure that those investments are actually a net benefit to Canada and certainly within the confines of our interests, as well, on national security.
That's why my questions, first and foremost, given the presentations, will be for Dr. Leblond.
You outlined three interesting areas. Some of them, actually, are in alignment with my second reading speech on this and a number of other areas. I'd like to ask you about a few of them, perhaps starting with your first point, which was on the nature of investment and national security.
If I heard you correctly, the first part of that is a concern about not just making sure that we have the appropriate national security reviews when warranted. I think we're all probably in unison that this really needs to happen when it's a state-owned enterprise, particularly one from a hostile country because their interests are not always aligned with ours.
You mentioned the area of assets, tangible and intangible, and that a company may choose to review. I think we've had trouble in the last few years even deciding whether or not we should do national security reviews and net benefit reviews on entire companies. We have a long list of them, from Neo Lithium on, that have not had them.
My question to you is on the assets side, tangible and intangible. What is the impact if some of our critical technology....? We've had some of the most inventive blockchain technology, for example, we've heard, invented here in Toronto. Those are subject...not blockchain itself but we constantly see those. From my understanding, I don't think the Investment Canada Act has any provisions for a review of asset sales, whether that be a mine that an overall company sells—so the company is not being sold but the mine is being sold—or whether it's an intangible one like a technology or a database.
Specifically, what kind of amendment do you think we could make to this bill to make that a part of the automatic review process or some sort of threshold for review?