Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to move CPC-10.
This is, again, the “shall” and “may” thing. In its current form, Bill C-34 doesn't compel the minister to conduct a national security review, as we've talked about before. Rather than making it optional, we believe it would be helpful to have an automatic trigger that would compel a minister to go a little deeper into the security review.
As I've mentioned before, my poster children for this are Tanco and Hytera, where the minister of the day, on whatever recommendations he chose, did not go into enough detail. I don't know what the recommendations were, but in my view they needed to go further than the first stage of the review.
My concern in this case is that I just don't see how a state-owned enterprise, a Chinese company, being primarily or controlled through the state-owned enterprise—or if not through the state-owned enterprise, at least by the 2017 national security law that was passed in China requiring it to spy and requiring it to steal technology as part of being a good citizen of the Chinese Communist Party—didn't get the in-depth review for these acquisitions.
How could a telecommunications company and its assets in Canada not be considered strategic? They obviously are in the U.S. I know attitudes may have evolved toward Huawei, and with Hytera being charged last year and the only lithium-producing mine in Manitoba being so critical to the issue going forward.
Hopefully, the Ring of Fire and those things will eventually be developed in Canada, and we're not at the point at which our only lithium-producing company is owned by a Chinese state-owned enterprise and everything it mines goes to China.
Given the emphasis on the EV strategy by the government, and by governments of the day, and the move to that, it was probably a little short-sighted to not get a more in-depth strategic look at either the net benefit or, in this case, the national security review. Perhaps today, security might be viewed a little differently from how it was viewed in 2017. I'm not sure, but hindsight's always 20/20. This forces it to go to a deeper dive. It removes some of that ambiguity and gives the minister a little more heft around the table for the minister's ultimate decision.
I won't go over the diligence of various ministers. I went over that last time and got a few smiles. Regardless of government, not all ministers are created equal. Mr. Masse called this the Maxime Bernier clause, and I tend to agree with that. At least he didn't leave any documents.... Well, maybe he did leave documents around on that too, but I'll leave it there for now. This just provides a suspenders and belt approach, as someone said a few meetings ago.
Thank you.