Mr. Speaker, I would like to inform you that I will be sharing my time with the member for Burnaby—Douglas.
Today I rise once again to speak about the Investment Canada Act and once again I am disappointed that I have to rise and speak to the problems that have still not been addressed.
Why am I so disappointed? Two years ago the House unanimously supported an NDP motion calling to improve the Investment Canada Act to make the net benefit test more transparent, to give communities affected by foreign takeovers the chance to have their voices heard. I know that only too well because many of the comments we have heard today from both sides of the House relate to Vale with the takeover of Inco and Xstrata with the takeover of Falconbridge that happened in my riding. None of those voices was heard.
I am also disappointed because if the government had fulfilled its commitment, we would not be debating this issue again, but instead, the Conservatives ignored the legitimate concerns of Canadians. Last Friday's announcement by the Prime Minister makes it all too clear the Investment Canada Act needs to be fixed. Although I am disappointed that we again have to debate this issue, I am a proud member of this party, the only party that puts the interests of Canadians first, especially on this issue.
I feel like I am quoting a Katy Perry song, Last Friday Night. Every time the Conservatives make an announcement relating to the Investment Canada Act, it happens on Friday night. The song talks about doing shots on table tops. I do not know what the Conservatives are doing, but they are making decisions that are affecting Canadians and it is not doing any of them any justice. Inconsistent messaging is coming from the Conservatives.
Nexen and Progress takeovers are both done using existing rules and the Conservatives have all said these existing rules are broken. In the announcement the Prime Minister admitted that the old rules did not work and that moving forward, takeovers by state-owned enterprises would unlikely be approved. If the old rules do not work, why are we approving the sell-off of assets under them? It has been two years since the motion to rewrite them and Conservatives did nothing. The new rules were written in secret by the PMO and still fail Canadians.
There has been no clarification of the net benefit test, no public consultations with impacted Canadians, no mandatory disclosure of guarantees, nothing to approve reciprocity of Canadian investors abroad, no consideration of the strategic importance of an asset and rules still say that the SOEs can buy Canadian assets in exceptional circumstances. What does exceptional circumstances mean? We need that clarified.
We have a broken ICA review process system and a broken promise to fix it. Instead, on a Friday night Conservatives merely tinkered with the process that everyone agreed was broken. In 2010, the Conservative government unanimously supported our motion calling for clearer net benefit tests and a more transparent investment review process, including mandatory public hearings with affected communities, public disclosure of all conditions attached to approval of a takeover along with the enforceable penalties for non-compliance, clarifying that the goal of the act was to encourage foreign investment that would bring new capital in technology and create jobs rather than simply seeking control of strategic Canadian resources.
Both the Prime Minister and then industry minister in the early 2000s promised two years ago to clarify the meaning of net benefit in the act.
I can speak specifically about why we need some clear guidelines when it comes to the Investment Canada Act. As I mentioned at the start of my speech, in 2006 Inco and Falconbridge were both taken over by Vale and Xstrata. When Inco was taken over by Xstrata, there were vague promises of no job losses. There was no way to hold the company to account after the takeover was completed.
For a year, while a strike raged in my community, we on this side stood in the House asked the government to help us clarify what was in the act and understand why so many jobs were lost in our communities when we had a guarantee that there would be no job losses for the first three years. All the job losses happened within that time frame, but the government did nothing. The government said that it could not provide the information as it was confidential. While I respect that it is confidential, it should not be that way. That is why New Democrats have been calling for changes to the Investment Canada Act to make it more transparent, so communities affected by takeovers have the opportunity to hear what the promises and guarantees will be and so members can discuss it and be prepared.
The other side is asking New Democrats to name one thing we support. Essar Steel in Sault Ste. Marie has done a good job of being a foreign company that is investing in its community. We are talking about what is going on with the Investment Canada Act that is broken and that the government is refusing to fix.
There is also the FIPA, the Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement. Once this comes into effect, it will make the Prime Minister's comments on SOEs taking over Canadian assets moot. The FIPA says that once a Chinese company is established in Canada, it must receive national treatment, meaning it is to be treated the same way that the government treats Canadian companies. This means that the CNOOC Nexen deal will be treated as a domestic firm for further acquisitions. Even limiting protections of the Investment Canada Act will now be lost. All of this is moot. If we are allowing the FIPA to move forward, then who is to say that all of this is going to happen? If the government tries to block CNOOC from further acquisitions, it could face lawsuits in the millions of dollars or billions of dollars filed with secret international tribunals so Canadians will never know the real costs.
Not only does FIPA sell out Canadians but it does so without any reciprocal benefits for Canadian companies that want to purchase Chinese assets. Grandfathers in China's opaque and uncatalogued regulatory rules go into this treaty and the Prime Minister's commitment to ensuring access to China for Canadian investors now rings hollow.
It is not just the NDP that was calling for a lot of these changes to a broken act that needs fixing. We have all talked about the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. We all share the NDP's concern that the rules leave Canadians in the dark. Even foreign investors do not understand how the Conservatives are making their decisions.
We were told of the framework only after submission, and we were quite surprised....We wish we knew what the new framework will be. At this point, the whole industry has no clue.
That was said on November 29 by the chief executive of Petronas.
In summation, the system is a mess. Canadians are in the dark. Foreign investors are in the dark. As the system stands, all the power for deciding if a foreign takeover is approved or not lies in the hands of the Prime Minister. That is not how the system should work in a parliamentary democracy. There should be clear rules that everyone can understand, with benchmarks that we can properly judge every potential acquisition. The NDP can be trusted to put such a system in place. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the government.