Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I will make a slight alteration to CPC-11, if I can, as I table it. Just to be clear, I believe there's an issue in CPC-11 with what I proposed as new subsection 25.3(6.2). That's at the bottom on the page.
I propose that we put forward this motion without that new subsection. There perhaps is an issue, as I understand it, around whether or not it would be out of order. It imposes, I believe, a new condition or a new requirement on the minister, and it's a minor element of what we're trying to do with this amendment.
This amendment deals primarily with the fact that no clause in Bill C-34 allows the minister to review past acquisitions and mergers under the national security review process. The amendment seeks to give the minister power to review past acquisitions by non-Canadian state-owned enterprises through the national security review process. The geopolitical situation in the world is constantly changing, as we know. Acquisitions conducted by authoritarian states like China 10 years ago did not pose the same sort of national security threat, in my view, at that time, that they perhaps do now, but could pose a threat today.
Several of us have pointed out, and some of the witnesses have pointed out, that the minister needs to have the power to review previously approved ICA acquisitions by non-Canadian companies through that. Indeed, I've actually had a couple of sidebar conversations generally with the minister on this, on some acquisitions in the past. While the minister ordered last year three mine interests to be divested under policy, there were some other ones I brought up, like the Tanco mine, where he said it didn't allow him to go back far enough to deal with that issue. I think, actually, I may have even read about the minister referring to something more recently in the media when he was asked about reviewing an acquisition.
We put this forward because, whether it's this minister or current ministers, we would need the ability to go back when the geopolitical situation changes, as it has with regard to China. We had what I call sort of the “Bill Clinton” policy for many, many years through various governments—that through broader trade and economic engagement in the WTO, we could help China become a more open and a more...maybe not democratic, but a more human rights-based country.
I think that actually did work for a while, but the regime changed. With that regime change, we've seen, in my view, quite a bit of a step back. The regime has very different motivations in terms of how it engages internationally than we hoped for over the last 20 years. In fact, I think we're in a business cold war right now, in some ways, with China in particular. They are very aggressive in acquiring mineral rights around the world and companies under certain levels in our country. They have already acquired some of our strategic assets that we cannot get back.
Mr. Chair, I would urge members to at least give the minister the authority in the act and to give the government the ability to go back and revisit some of these, as I believe many other countries have in some of their acts. I think Britain and certainly the United States have given the minister some ability to go back further than ours does.