Canada Proceeds With Promised Changes To Foreign Investment Review

Translated by Rofi Zhou

Overview

The Canadian government's 2013 budget implementation bill (C-60) will enact a number of previously announced adjustments to the Investment Canada Act (ICA). The proposed amendments address three main areas:

• the long-awaited increases in the thresholds for review of most acquisitions to C$1 billion in "enterprise value", phased-in over a four-year period;
• the manner in which state-owned enterprises (SOEs) will be defined and the introduction of additional "control in fact" tests for acquisitions by SOEs; and
• extensions to the timelines for national security reviews.

These amendments follow on the heel of the December 2012 revisions to the guidelines for assessing investments by SOEs (Revised SOE Guidelines). At the time, the government emphasized Canada's continuing openness to foreign investment generally and signalled these areas of further fine-tuning. It also approved two major SOE investments in the oil and gas