Thank you for the question.
I can't reference anything in the literature around this, but I'll answer more from an observational perspective as a resident of northern Ontario. We've seen some of these takeovers recently. You've referenced the takeover of Inco by Vale Inco—now Vale—and Falconbridge by Xstrata, and at an experiential level, these have not been really positive experiences.
It's hard to say whether Falconbridge would have shut shop at the Kidd Met site and moved operations to Quebec. Maybe they would have, or maybe that's the effect of having a foreign owner. It's hard to say if the last strike in Sudbury would have been the kind of strike it was if Inco had still been running the company. It's hard to say whether the very limited responses—Vale's in particular—to the Sudbury soil study, showing high levels of contamination in local soils from the smelting operations, would have been the same if it had still been a Canadian-owned company. There's a sense in the community that when you have decisions being made on an economic basis by people who are further away, the decisions are less beneficial to the community.
Vale's response to the Sudbury soil study is that they'll have to make a business case on a year-by-year basis to improve their dust management at the Sudbury site, and that improving the dust control will reduce the amount of exposure of the residents—the people of Sudbury basin—to the nickel contaminants. When they have to make this on a business case, I am not convinced that's the same dynamic at play when it's a foreign ownership than when it's a Canadian-owned company, and a company that has roots in the community.
I always favour local ownership, local control. How that plays out in the literature, I don't know.