Canadian Lawyer InHouse

JoE BrADForD, CNooC Canada Craig Hoskins, a lawyer with Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP, agrees. "We're starting to get service companies coming in and setting up on a startup, greenfield basis where they send over one or two people from China with a view to start to provide services to the bigger companies who have made these huge investments and have these operations to start," he says. At an event held in Calgary this past summer, Chinese and Canadian trade delegations signed an agreement as a commitment to bolster investment between the two countries. The largely symbolic move comes at a time when experts say while the public might be concerned about seeing more large state owned enterprise deals, it is more likely to be smaller, privately financed deals that will dominate transactions between Canada and China in the coming years. July's Canada-China City Economic Cooperation Forum in Calgary involved Canadian companies and other stakeholders interacting with Chinese companies doing business in Canada. The Ontario chapter includes the CEO of the Bank of China in Canada and the CEO of the ICDC — China's largest bank out of Toronto. The conversation was largely about the 22 • o c t ob er 2013 CASSIE'S CAMERA I'm seeing that Chinese companies, particularly service companies, are making significant investments in time, personnel, and resources in their Canadian operations. decision is seen as injecting a lot of ambiguity into what Canada's real attitude is towards investment from China. There has been a lot of attention given to the ambivalence, at best, of public opinion towards Chinese investment that was reported on during the course of that whole debate last fall," says Hoskins. JoinT venTureS more popular climate for investment in Canada. Hoskins spoke on a panel at the conference and says too often people focus on the CNOOC deal and perceived negativity such large foreign investments receive when it will be the smaller, private investment deals that will be more common. "Quite often the CNOOC INHOUSE The ties between Canada and China continue to grow says David Lefebvre, a partner with Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP in Calgary. "We're such symbiotic economies. They now have lots of financial resources and expertise and lots of people and can use a lot of resources that we have and vice versa. I only see that relationship continuing to grow." Most of his work is acting for Chinese clients acquiring assets in other places around the world. Today his work is broad based and while he says the deals are not on the scale of U.S. investment into Canada, it's no longer just about buying big companies like OPTI and Nexen. "A lot of the deals we do wouldn't make the newspaper," says Lefebvre. "That said, there is a wariness after the Nexen deal in terms of all the new rules of the government in terms of how they will be applied. We haven't seen any deals like that since then." In recent years the type of deal structure has morphed to more of a joint venture, especially in the mining arena. In the beginning it was felt Chinese SOEs wanted to take 100 per cent of a company, store up the resources, and never be a

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