Mr. Speaker, I agree with the hon. member in a lot of his analysis but it seems to me that his solution is that when the horse is out of the barn we will pass a bill, when in fact a provision is in the budget, and I would refer to it as an obnoxious provision in the budget, which makes Canadian companies less competitive and less able to acquire foreign based companies and, because they are less able to acquire foreign based companies, they, therefore, will be acquired themselves.
It seems to me that we would want to strengthen our Canadian companies' ability to acquire rather than play defence by passing a bill that says something to the effect that no foreign based corporation can acquire a Canadian company up to a certain level of shareholding or something like that.
Would the hon. member agree with me that this very blunt instrument that the budget proposes needs to be, in effect, stopped in its tracks very quickly because it will have a huge number of unintended consequences, one of which may actually be playing out today in the pages of our national newspapers with respect to a Canadian icon?