Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much, gentlemen.
Mr. McMahon, as an aside, I just want to thank the Fraser Institute for its commentary in recommending that the current Harper government follow the lead of the prior Liberal governments in its economic policies. Thank you very much for that. I thought that showed great insight.
I'll just throw in my background—not necessarily a philosophy background, but an international law background—and suggest that entering into international trade treaties is not a giving up of sovereignty, but is, in fact, an exercise thereof. Entering into contractual arrangements is, in fact, an exercise of our sovereign ability to do that, but that's a much longer conversation.
Some interesting issues have been raised, Mr. Sinclair, and the challenge we have now is that we're not going to answer these in five minutes, so I will be asking for some further discussion, actually. On the issue of property rights, there's a very big difference between an ownership right and a right to use. If you have a contract to have a three-year supply of widgets, for example, and the widget supplier cuts that off after a year and a half, then you will have a legal claim against the supplier of widgets for the loss you will have suffered with regard to lack of access to those widgets for the subsequent year and a half.
I don't know that compensating somebody for an early termination of a right to use water or an early termination of a right to use wood or timber, or have access to that, is a bad thing. I don't know, and I don't know that it necessarily needs to be a denial of the underlying ownership rights of those resources to provide compensation if, in fact, there was an arrangement to use and that arrangement gets terminated early.
As I said, we're not going to be able to answer these questions in five minutes, but I would like to have a longer conversation because, like you, I feel we have to make sure we maintain that ownership right and the rights that come with it with the provinces and the territories.
Here is my other challenge. We've heard that perhaps there's been abuse of nationality of enterprises to take advantage of chapter 11. We've heard challenges with possible arbitration panel biases that need to be addressed. We have very clearly a lack of communication, and this is the one I will finally ask your thoughts on now and again for further discussion because, as a perfect example, the country is in the middle of negotiations with Europe. I think the opportunity here is to learn from some of the challenges that the NAFTA provisions have created to allow us, in our discussions with Europe, to perhaps word things better--to be clearer on nationality, for example, and to address some of the challenges we've seen in a clearer way.
Any thoughts you might have on that, after this, would be very helpful.
Finally, the most important thing I have come away with from the AbitibiBowater issue is the extraordinary lack of communication that allowed the federal government and Canadian taxpayers to be on the hook for a claim that could conceivably have had that compensation.... I don't disagree at all with the idea of compensation, but it could have allowed that compensation to go to other aspects of liabilities, such as the remediation and the pensions that never happened.
It's very frustrating to hope for responses in five minutes.