加拿大政府终于点头 中海油获准收购
Stephen Harper’s announcement
on foreign oilsands investment from China is both serious and empty.
It is serious in that
it responds to real political pressure, not all of which is praiseworthy.
It is empty in that,
once the rhetoric is stripped away, it changes nothing.
Politics first. The
political significance of Harper’s well-publicized Friday announcement is that
economic nationalism is far from dead in Canada.
Conventional wisdom
holds that economic nationalism was an anomaly of the Pierre Trudeau period — a
blip in Canada’s inexorable journey to a globalized world.
The conventional
wisdom is false. The targets may have changed, but enough Canadians are still
worried about economic sovereignty that the most business-friendly federal
government in decades has been forced to demonstrate — not once but thrice —
its opposition to foreign takeovers.
In the most recent
case, the purchase of
Alberta-based Nexen Inc. by the China National Offshore Oil Corp., Harper justified his reluctance by noting
that the buyer is state-owned.
But that doesn’t
explain Ottawa’s earlier refusals to allow private takeovers — in one case, of
assets owned by the British Columbia-based firm McDonald Dettwiler; in the
other of Saskatchewan’s PotashCorp.
The government claimed
the first decision, which prevented a U.S. purchase, involved national
security. But the real reason seems to have been Ottawa’s desire to maintain
Canada’s presence in a strategic industry — the same rationale, incidentally,
used by the Trudeau Liberals to justify their encouragement of Canadian-owned
oil companies.
The PotashCorp.
decision, which prevented an Australian takeover, was based on raw political
calculation. The takeover bid was unpopular in Saskatchewan. With an election
looming, Harper didn’t want to risk losing seats.
But the second point
about Friday’s announcement is that — in real terms — nothing happened.
Harper’s rhetoric on
the danger of foreign state-owned enterprises was stern. But in the end, he let
state-owned CNOOC buy Nexen. And he left the criteria by which his government
will judge future foreign investments as vague as they were before.
We know Ottawa won’t
let a Nexen-style deal through again unless there are “exceptional”
circumstances. But we don’t know what those circumstances are.
Perhaps what the Prime
Minister should have said is that he will allow all foreign takeovers except
those that might cause him political grief.
Finally, the real
question: Why China?
If this government
were concerned about big companies exerting outsize pressure on the oilsands,
it would restrict investments by privately owned Shell or ExxonMobil — both of
which, according to Forbes magazine, are larger than CNOOC.
Instead it has raised
threefold, to $1 billion, the threshold by which it even monitors takeovers by
private firm.
If Ottawa were serious
about limiting state-owned companies, it would have taken aim at Norway’s
Statoil, a bigger player than CNOOC and one that operates freely in Canada.
But it focused on
China instead. Why? Given the florid commentary about China’s alleged aims and
ambitions, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Harper is pandering to
classic yellow-peril fears of wily (and Communist) Orientals conspiring to
monopolize our vital essences.
In fact, China
operates pretty much like any other developing nation. It uses low-wage labour
to expand exports. It then uses export earnings to invest at home and abroad.
The real problem with
China’s Communists is not that they’re unusually wily but that, like the
Harper’s Conservatives, they want to keep workers’ wages down.
If Ottawa were truly
worried about the effect of Chinese investment on the lives of real people, it
never would have allowed one Chinese-controlled firm to import 200 low-wage
“temporary” coal miners into B.C. instead of employing Canadians.
Yet this government
has done exactly that. It wants to be seen as concerned about China. It just
doesn’t want to be concerned.
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