selling off assets to foreign capital is not sovereignty, nor is this asserting any sort of independence, nor is this going to result in stable economic outcomes. this is short term thinking and selling to the highest bidder under the umbrella of us hegemony.
you don't need much economic education to understand this. just look at the name of the body that we're seeking "investment" from - a sovereign wealth fund. arab countries generally have sovereign wealth funds. norway has one. canada does not.
so, whose sovereignty are we supporting? the answer is the obvious one: the country with the sovereign wealth fund, at the expense of our own.
the concept of canada has a serious issue in front of it that it needs to address if it wants to survive, and that is it's aversion to funding economic development using the bank of canada. why, exactly, do we have a central bank at all, if we can't use it to print money? we used to do that.
i've looked into this a lot because there's a lot of bad arguments on the left about this. the reality is that we used to fund infrastructure projects with the bank of canada but stopped in the early 1970s as an indirect consequence of something called the nixon shock, which occurred when nixon suddenly abandoned the gold standard without warning. since then, canada has borrowed money from private lenders and paid interest on it.
without getting into the economics of it, most of which i think is wrong, the geopolitics of it is that we followed the direction of american hegemony, as a client state. nothing that i know about pierre trudeau suggests to me that he wanted to do that, but he did that. call jean and ask him, while you still can.
if american hegemony is over, we shouldn't have to do that anymore, we should have a place for public funding of infrastructure and public ownership of infrastructure, like we did before the americans forced us to stop. this is one of the most substantive restrictions american hegemony placed on it's clients, and should be the first thing to be jettisoned in a multi-polar world.
that doesn't mean we should turn the bank of canada into a magic check book. it's not one. but, the collapse of american hegemony would mean the imf is no longer policing us, and we can stop paying out trillions to private debt holders.
canada needs to make this change if it wants to survive. selling assets to arab countries that want to colonize us is going to get us invaded by the americans, and if that is what our political class has in the plans to "restore sovereignty", i have no interest in it at all and i welcome our new yankee overlords.