OTTAWA — An intelligence expert said the federal government’s decision not to conduct a formal national security review on the takeover of a Canadian lithium mining company by a Chinese state-owned company was a “mistake.”
The government misjudged the takeover’s significance to Canada’s economic and national security both in the present and future, said Wesley Wark, a visiting professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in international affairs and intelligence gathering.
“The kinds of explanations that have been offered by the government to date I find wholly unsatisfactory and very narrowly focused,” he told a House of Commons committee Wednesday.
