Due Concern, Impeccable Advice

"While the vast majority of foreign investment in Canada is carried out in an open and transparent manner, certain state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms with close ties to their home governments have pursued opaque agendas or received clandestine intelligence support for their pursuits here.
"When foreign companies with ties to foreign intelligence agencies or hostile governments seek to acquire control over strategic sectors of the Canadian economy, it can represent a threat of Canadian security interests.  The foreign entities might well exploit that control in an effort to facilitate illegal transfers of technology or to engage in other espionage and other foreign interference activities.
"CSIS expects that national security concerns related to foreign investment in Canada will continue to materialize, owing to the increasingly prominent role that SOEs are playing in the economic strategies of some foreign governments."
Canadian Security Intelligence Service annual report

CSIS is putting the Government of Canada on intelligence notice that some state-owned foreign companies are in pursuit of "opaque agendas" within Canada.  In delivering their warning, in somewhat guarded, but sternly obvious terms, yet also opaque, the security agency has placed a hot potato in the hands of a government caught between wanting to trade and needing to fend off certain investors. 

Risk offending China again?  Why not.  They're anxious to acquire greater investment shares in Alberta's oilsands production, but if obstacles to this kind of massive investment are put in place, it's not likely that China, in its voracious search for energy for its manufacture-and-trade agenda will hesitate to acquire energy from Canada simply because it's been rebuffed on investment.  Canada has a product China needs.  And the investments China has already made will simply have to suffice.  And thanks for that.

Canada needs investment, but not all that badly.  If not from China, then elsewhere; traditionally from the United States, which has temporarily chosen to rebuff Canada, but which will eventually come around to reversing its decision on the pipeline project.  Nexen shareholders have approved overwhelmingly the $15.1-billion takeover bid by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation.  Greed overwhelms national security for them.

But not necessarily for those whom we elect to act always in the greater public interest of the country. The report makes clear that there are some countries - and one in obvious particularity - going to great lengths to advantage themselves in the acquisition of energy sources, activities which have led inexorably to "a noticeable increase in clandestine attempts" for the purpose of gaining unauthorized access to proprietary information or technologies.

"As a world leader in communications, biotechnology, mineral and energy extraction, aerospace and other areas, Canada remains an attractive target for economic espionage.  Several countries engage in economic espionage against Canada to acquire expertise, dual-use technology and other relevant information related to those and other sectors.
" It's important to note that those who commit economic espionage are not just interested in domestic Canadian interests and resources.  Canada's commercial interests abroad are similarly vulnerable.  The implications of economic espionage on Canada can be measured in lost jobs, in lost tax revenues and in an overall diminished competitive advantage."  CSIS annual report

Duly warned.  Wouldn't be possible to make the disadvantages of permitting a wholesale sell-out like what is being envisioned, clearer, now would it be?  The government will now undertake its own review of whether or not such an investment by a Chinese state-owned enterprise will be of sufficient benefit to Canada to proceed.  The Government of Canada's turnabout on trade with China after its disappointment with the U.S., and its determination to widen its prospects leaves it vulnerable to accusations by China that it isn't all that serious, after all.

Too bad.  As a sovereign nation, we should be making decisions solely on what benefits Canada in the round.  And this move by China, reflecting its agreements with arable land rentals in African countries which benefit those nations' dictators and do nothing to aid agriculture for Africans, reeks of similar one-sided advantages.  We can do better.