Canada’s Ownership and Control Rules: What Every Eager Foreign Investor Should Know

1. Introduction: Turning Impediments into Opportunities

Canada requires that Canadians own and control certain targeted industries, including telecommunications operators, broadcasting licensees, domestic airlines and a number of cultural industries such as certain book publishing and retailing businesses. Despite complaints that these rules lead to inefficient industries, diminished competitiveness, high consumer prices and reduced investment, they nonetheless endure. Canadian politicians are reluctant to weather the political storm that they fear will follow from liberalizing these rules. In an environment where worries about the "hollowing out" of the Canadian economy have become something of a political hot-button, no politician wants to be identified with easing the way for yet another Canadian corporate mainstay to fall under foreign control.