We Love you,We Love you Not

摘要

At the London Oil and Money Conference in October, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce vice-chairman Jim Prentice made headlines when he told an international petroleum industry audience that Canada's new takeover rules were scaring off foreign direct investment in the energy sector. In an interview with Albeta Oil in Calgary after a recent trip to China, Prentice took the time to elaborate on his comments. The background is clear enough. A year after the new Investment Canada Act rules were announced in December 2012, investment dollars from state-owned enterprises have essentially stopped flowing into the bitumen extraction business. Energy-directed foreign direct investment - of which SOEs play an important role - fell off a cliff in 2013, declining 92 per cent year-to-year from $27 billion to $2 billion. These are very worrisome statistics for a nation highly dependent on foreign investment to fund its capital-intensive resource industries.