Certainly.
Canadian businesses and Quebec businesses--for example, Bombardier--have worldwide networks. The outflow of Canadian investment is about equal to the inflow of Canadian investment. Most of our great firms, or a few of our great firms, would survive without international markets. I mentioned Bombardier, and there's Magna. Name any major manufacturing or service industry in Canada, such as our banks; if rules were simply dropped, as my friend here would like, internationally our businesses would be left high and dry.
I'd like to make a further domestic point. If we give Canadian provinces untrammelled sovereignty over resources so that they can make and break agreements when they wish--withdraw timber rights, withdraw mineral rights, withdraw water rights that they've agreed to--and we give them the power to do that without compensation, we simply shut down all mining, all oil and gas exploration, all timber harvesting in Canada. No company is going to go in if, on a Wednesday, the provincial government can simply say, “All these properties actually belong to the state. We have decided to terminate your thing. It doesn't matter that you've just spent a billion dollars building a mine. We're taking away your mineral resources because we want to.” It could be for whatever reason. No one would invest in any of these industries that are so important to rural Canada.
You have it both internationally, as you pointed out--and pointed out extremely well, I thought--but if we went the full extent of what's being recommended here, with no compensation for resource rights in Canada, we would also see an immense blow to our economy and a devastation of rural life if we accepted that provinces have sovereignty and are not constrained by their own agreements.