Article content continued

Executives from both companies mobilized as quickly as possible and were on flights to Ottawa Monday for meetings with Mr. Paradis. A news release announcing the pending visit was issued to manage concern that the deal was dead.

“We are hopeful to get meetings with the Minister of Industry to start that dialogue in this 30-day period, to understand what those issues are and see how we can remedy them,” Mr. Culbert said. “It doesn’t seem that we are far apart here. If time is the issue, let’s understand what is required and be able to move forward on that front.”

No one, including Mr. Culbert, seems to know where the government is headed with its new guidelines.

But everyone agrees the government itself is struggling to achieve a balance between investors who want Canada to keep its doors open to foreign capital and Canadians who are worried about too much foreign control of natural resources.

“The minister did indicate, as you know, on Friday that the government is not at the current time in a position to say that the particular transaction is a net benefit to Canada,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Monday.

“There is a comment period, a response period of 30 days … and so we’re not going to say anything that would prejudice that particular discussion during this time. But as I’ve said before in the context of another transaction, the government has in the not-too-distant future the intention to put out a clear, new policy framework regarding these sorts of transactions.”

But a lot of damage was done. Investors across North America were frantically trying to understand Monday how to read Ottawa’s strange signals. Progress energy shares lost 9%; Nexen was down 4.4%.

Canada’s foreign investment guidelines have been widely criticized for their ambiguous language, for being open to political manipulation and for being inadequate to deal with the rush of investment into the oilpatch.

Regardless of what the final decision on Progress turns out to be, Ottawa proved critics right with its handling of the purchase. That, too, is not in Canada’s net benefit.