Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for the invitation to be here.
I particularly appreciate the snow show outside. I was in Mexico about a week ago in a small town, and people were asking me about the Canadian weather. I confidently assured them that the worst of the Canadian winter was over by March 1 without fail.
I'm going to make a brief comment about the presentation we've just heard and then I'm going to go off at a somewhat unusual angle.
The rule of law is crucial to maintain, including the rule of law that descends from trade treaties. If we expect fairness internationally with our investments, which are global, we must provide fairness to those who invest in Canada. When an industry is based on the use of natural resources and that is part of the conditions for which it has invested and built jobs in Canada, then to deprive that firm of natural resources is indeed a violation of property rights, given that their investment was based on that.
The Canadian government or provincial governments, if they so wish and have a compelling reason to do so, may of course expropriate property in the public interest. That's well recognized, but the right of compensation for the expropriation of property rights is also crucial. That is a good balance, with the government having the ability in the public interest to expropriate if necessary while providing the compensation that Canadian investors would expect abroad.
Now, as I mentioned, I'm going to take a bit of an unusual turn here and, if you'll excuse the word, give something of a philosophical discussion.
When I was initially contacted by the committee, I was told that the concern was about a violation of Canadian sovereignty. Any diminution of sovereignty is typically—by my friend from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Council of Canadians, the CBC—deemed a bad thing.
Sovereignty, of course, descends from the sovereign; sovereignty meant the power of the sovereign. Now it typically means the power of the state. In fact, the greatest advances that we have seen over the last few hundred years are a reduction of state sovereignty, and the greatest tragedies we have seen over the last few hundred years are the assertion of state sovereignty.
State sovereignty has been eroded in two directions: internally, as more and more of the power of the sovereign was transferred to the individual and the space around the individual has grown, limiting state power; sovereignty has also been diminished externally, through trade treaties, treaties of peace, and other international connections, which have produced huge benefits.
The revulsion against giving away any sort of sovereignty can be summarized by what was on the Council of Canadians' home page during its combatting of the multilateral agreement—