The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.
Jim Prentice is senior executive vice-president and vice-chair of CIBC, and a former industry minister.
A few months ago, The Economist magazine opined that the defining battle of the 21st century would not be between capitalism and socialism, but between different versions of capitalism – market capitalism on the one hand and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) on the other.
If that is so, the battleground has now shifted to Canada’s oil sands. To be clear, I do not have a horse in this race. I personally favoured a Canadian outcome for Nexen. Its assets lay in the shop window for months, arguably years, but no Canadian energy company emerged to buy them.
Instead, CNOOC, one of the world’s largest SOEs, has stepped forward with a blockbuster offer. This transaction represents the largest outbound Chinese deal to date and has been carefully insulated to provide commitments for Canadian investment, Canadian jobs, a Canadian hemispheric headquarters and a Canadian domiciled public listing.
This proposed acquisition should not come as a surprise. If anything, it is remarkable that the Chinese have taken this long to move on the strategic opportunity represented by Canadian energy assets in a weakening commodity cycle.
This day has been coming for some time. In 2008, I was industry minister when the subject of SOEs and the oil sands first surfaced. At the time, Canada was comfortably asleep. In fact, the best briefing materials available then were publications like The Economist.
In the face of that policy vacuum, we moved to protect Canada’s interests by releasing guidelines on SOEs that emphasized the need to adhere to North American market principles and standards of governance and accountability. More importantly, we amended the Investment Canada Act to reinforce the “net benefit” test, and Ottawa later introduced a national security test. Critics of those reforms argued that they were vague and ambiguous. They are – they were intended to be and that is exactly how they should stay.
Those reforms now afford the Prime Minister (and there should be no doubt that this will be his decision) all of the requisite flexibility to protect and advance Canada’s interests. For his part, as he has quite properly noted publicly, no one should make any assumptions about what the outcome will be.
So, what should he do? The geopolitical context is important.
First, the Canadian government is in the midst of taking our strategic partnership with China to a new and more important level. This is essential to our future economic well-being.
Most significantly, while we were slow to realize it, a country that has only one customer for its most valuable export is in constant peril, even if that customer is your best friend. U.S. President Barack Obama has reinforced just how significant that risk is.
So the Prime Minister’s hands are somewhat tied by the need to move forward in the definition of our “strategic partnership” with China. It would be a bad time to turn back, even though this partnership requires improved definition and, above all else, reciprocity.
For the rest of this article, please go to the Globe and Mail website: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/nexen-deal-canada-must-remain-open-for-business/article4441212/