Mr. Speaker, I am very happy to follow up a question that I asked during question period a few days ago about the government's foreign takeover policy. This is especially timely now because the Conservative members of the House, less than a fortnight ago, voted down an opposition motion that would have made the review process for foreign takeovers more transparent. They voted against the motion to hold public hearings on the proposed $15 billion takeover of Nexen by the Communist Chinese state-owned China National Offshore Oil Company. They voted against all of this barely two years after the same Conservative members voted unanimously in favour of a similar motion introduced in this House by Jack Layton, which called for those same public hearings and transparency on foreign takeovers.
I asked the members on the other side of the House what had changed in the last two years. In just a couple of years the Prime Minister has shifted from accusing China of industrial espionage and a deplorable human rights records. In fact, he refused to attend the Beijing Olympics as a result. Now he is trying to bulldoze northern British Columbia's pristine forests so that we can ship raw, unprocessed bitumen by tankers to Communist China as fast as possible.
As I mentioned earlier in the chamber, this fire sale of western Canadian national resources comes at a time when eastern Canadians, like my constituents, are importing much more expensive foreign oil to heat their homes and put gas in their tanks. Mark Carney has been raising this issue repeatedly, asking why we sell low in the west and buy high in the east. Instead of shipping raw resources abroad, having a pipeline from western Canada to eastern Canada would help stem the loss of $19 billion a year from the Canadian economy. Will this strategic interest be helped in any way by selling Nexen to China's CNOOC?
There is even an existing natural gas pipeline route from west to east, going through Thunder Bay—Superior North. There is no reason that we could not lay another pipeline along the same route to bring petroleum and value added processing jobs, perhaps to a Thunder Bay refinery, for example.
Even the former Bank of Canada governor, David Dodge, is calling on Ottawa to prioritize a west to east oil pipeline to mitigate Canada's growing energy fuelled economic imbalance.
Most Canadians would likely think that our own energy security interests would be part of any foreign takeover review, but they would be wrong. The net benefit criteria in the Investment Canada Act are so fuzzy that national security is not even defined in it, and energy security is not mentioned at all.
The industry minister's answer to my question can basically be summed up with two words: “Trust us”. How can Canadians trust an opaque backroom review process based on criteria that are poorly defined, or where key considerations like our energy security are missing altogether? How can Canadians trust a government that seems to make energy policy decisions more on the basis of political ideology than practical strategic interests?
Instead of hiding behind the Investment Canada Act, which even the government has admitted needs updating, I am hoping to hear tonight and henceforth more substantial answers.