Yes. I'll try to, a little.
People may remember back to 2010, actually, when the former head of CSIS made some statements about foreign influence. Some of that may have been Chinese influence. It created a bit of a hue and cry. Certainly, the Liberals, who were in opposition at that time, were very unhappy about that. I think they even had Mr. Fadden at committee. Mr. Fadden didn't apologize for those statements. I think time has proved that he was right. I think the government of the day did apologize for Mr. Fadden. Mr. Fadden happily went on to have a very good career. He's very, very astute on matters of national security.
At that time, I don't think anybody or enough people were taking it that seriously. Subsequently there were things like this letter to the China Cultural Industry Association. They were doing a lot of PR, not just in Canada but all over the world. We were in a period of warming relations with China. Then a number of things started to happen. I think people started to realize that they were not playing fair. They were in the World Trade Organization, but they were actually using every loophole to their advantage.
Trade with China is not necessarily fair trade. There was criticism of some of the agreements that were entered into with China and concern, for example, that a customs agreement would have given them too much commercially sensitive information if they were interested in appropriating some of our information.
I think during the initial period, the concerns were more on the commercial side, the economic side, and on the dual use of technology side. With respect to the potential military uses of technology, on which you had Canadian universities working in collaboration with Chinese researchers, it took a while for us to get there. I think it's only fairly recently that universities have changed their policies on these things, with the encouragement of the granting councils.