Madam Speaker, clearly that pricked a little bit of a nerve over there, and I can imagine why.
I can absolutely imagine why, because when those people campaigned, they certainly did not campaign on the promise to stay silent. They certainly did not promise to stay quiet when the best interests of Saskatchewan and the best interests of Canada were at stake.
This was a situation where people of Saskatchewan, including the premier of Saskatchewan, were overwhelmingly saying that this would be a problem, and 13 Conservative members of Parliament from Saskatchewan were only able to sit on their hands. This is not criticism of them personally; it is a criticism of the atmosphere in the government that simply does not allow dissent, does not allow any other kind of debate, and I am very concerned about the fact that we have 13 members of Parliament who simply were unable to speak on behalf of their constituents.
I will go on to another question. When the Minister of Industry yesterday made his announcement, he said something I found rather extraordinary. He said the department, which he heads, made no recommendation. I might be not quite right, but if I remember correctly, the words were “the department made no recommendation”. This is the Investment Canada Act. This is the Ministry of Industry. This is part of its job and there are some extraordinarily talented, hard-working people in that department. For the last number of weeks there has been a great number of people focused on this. This is one of the biggest issues in Canada today, if not the biggest issue facing Canada right now in terms of what the ministry and what the department had to decide on. How is it possible, after all that time and guaranteed a significant amount of work by some very capable people, that the department made no recommendation?
I would suggest that is another example of the need by the government to control its message, to make sure there was no message before the Prime Minister made a decision. Let us not kid ourselves. This was very much from the Prime Minister's Office. This was not the Minister of Industry's decision on his own. But to deny the fact and to say that the entire department did not make a recommendation, I find extraordinarily hard to believe. It is another example of the deterioration of the entire governance process in this country that the people who we have working in government, supposedly on a non-partisan basis, to give advice to the government on an acquisition this significant for Saskatchewan, and for Canada as a whole, that those capable people apparently made no recommendation. We have to seriously question the role of the Prime Minister's Office and the minister in taking upon themselves alone the entire decision-making process in this regard.
I would also like to ask a question about net benefit. This does speak to the motion. I am not in agreement with all parts of the motion that is being proposed, but I do support significant portions of it that do call for greater transparency. We do not know what the government thinks net benefit means. In that regard, I would like to stress that I, as a representative of the Liberal Party, support foreign investment. We very strongly support foreign investment. Indeed, as other members of the House mentioned, we have had a great number of acquisitions in the last couple of decades, whichever government was in power, whether it be Liberal or Conservative. This will only be the second refusal, the first one having been based on national security.
There have been a number of other acquisitions that did not proceed, not because there was an open door without any restrictions, but because the process that we had undertaken had established certain examples of what would be required. So in those discussions the members of the department were able to suggest to the proposed acquirers that they were not going to meet the net benefit test and therefore the acquisitions did not proceed. So it is a mistake to say that no acquisition was ever refused. However I would say that within that context, the ones that were approved were an indication of just how open we are to foreign investment. That is a very important process. It is a very important thing for the Canadian economy.
However, we do have to determine the parameters and the criteria associated with net benefit. We do have to make this clear not only for ourselves, not only for the departmental workers who work so hard to help these processes along, but we also need to clarify the criteria of net benefit specifically in order to encourage foreign investment.
A potential acquirer, no matter where it might be in the world, will look at Canada, and this one is an even more egregious example because it is such a big acquisition and we have had no description of what net benefit is, none. A potential acquirer somewhere else in the world could look at Canada and say it is a wonderful place to invest. It has a wonderfully educated population. It has great winters. In all seriousness, it has a tremendous investment climate. However, a potential acquirer would have to wonder what would be the decision at the end. If the potential acquirer does not know what the criteria are, for example, if it does not know that it needs to maintain a head office in Canada, if it does not know for sure that it will need to maintain a certain number of jobs, if it does not know that there are going to be certain other requirements, it will be that much more loath and less inclined to even start the process for a potential acquisition in this country.
We, as Liberals, are very concerned about the need to establish much more detailed definitions of what net benefit means. That would in fact encourage foreign investment because right now we have a government decision that negates all the efforts of the department, that does not clarify what net benefit means and thus creates more confusion than there was to begin with.
Madam Speaker, I will continue this speech after question period.