Curtis: Who benefits from applying the ‘net benefit test’ to the CNOCC-Nexen deal?

By:
John Curtis
/
21 August, 2012
By: John Curtis
Adjunct Professor at Queen's University and Chair of Statistics Canada's Advisory Committee on International Trade Statistics

The net benefit test will be very difficult to apply in this case; we are in new territory. The purchaser is a state-owned enterprise (SOE) with objectives that could be multifold—-commercial, political, strategic….an assessment of net benefit will have to sort out each possibility and put it in the larger context of perception and/or reality: is Canada open or not and to what extent and under which circumstances?

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