44th Parl. 1st Sess.
October 26, 2023 10:00AM
- Oct/26/23 12:43:41 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Sarnia—Lambton.
The Liberal government has created a series of complicated and inefficient infrastructure programs that have regularly failed to deliver results and get money out the door. The Canada Infrastructure Bank, the government's flagship policy, is no exception to this fact. It has been an immense failure.
The Infrastructure Bank has spent millions on overhead, high-priced consultants, CEO payouts, bonuses and corporate welfare while failing to get critical infrastructure built as part of its mandate. It is debatable whether the bank has built even one infrastructure project. In fact, last year, the bank spent twice as much money on salaries and bonuses than it paid in infrastructure. It also spent almost $1 million on consulting and legal fees for an electricity project that never got off the ground.
The mandate of the bank is essentially to attract private sector investment for low-cost loans and to reduce the risk in order to get infrastructure built. However, the government's bank has turned into a form of taxpayer-funded corporate welfare. The bank repeatedly puts taxpayers on the hook for millions of dollars by subsidizing multi-billion dollar corporations, handing them low-cost interest rate loans at a much lower rate than what Canadians can go to the bank and get for themselves.
It is frankly perverse that while Canadians are suffering with almost double-digit interest rates for their mortgages, while Canadians are struggling to put food on the table, while Canadians are rationing their children's baby formula and while Canadians are worried about whether they will be able to heat their homes and fill their gas tanks to go to work, we are being so careless with the taxpayer-funded loans that the bank gives out. While Canadians fear they will not be able to make their mortgage payments, and the average Canadian has these real fears, they are being asked simultaneously to subsidize billion-dollar companies to build projects that are not even successful, are often not needed and could be built better by the private sector.
The bank was given a budget of $35 billion courtesy of taxpayers six years ago. The Liberals promised that taxpayers would see a return on investment of four times from private sector investors. They even anticipated that the investments from municipalities and provinces would yield an 11 times multiplier. However, that was six years ago and that has not happened. Private investment has not even been returned at a 1:1 ratio from the bank.
The Standing Committee on Transport, Infrastructure and Communities determined that the Infrastructure Bank was not fixable. It needed to be abolished. The sole recommendation in its report was that the bank be abolished. The committee's recommendation was based on the testimony given by stakeholders involved in the infrastructure projects across this entire country. Witnesses highlighted that the bank was inefficient, lacked transparency and was unable to secure the private investments it promised it would secure.
We are at a time of 40-year high inflation, when Canadians are struggling with the cost of home heating, groceries, food and daily living expenses. They cannot even afford their mortgage payments anymore because of the government's hefty deficit spending, which has driven up interest rates.
Canadians cannot afford to continue to subsidize the government's bad investment. Canadians can no longer afford to foot the bill for this bank that cannot even deliver one single infrastructure project to Canadians. Conservatives will create a winnable process that gets infrastructure built and develops communities without wasting taxpayer dollars.
The bank's executives each gave themselves bonuses last year, big bonuses, in fact. The Canada Infrastructure Bank paid $7.7 million in bonuses to every single one of its executives for getting zero projects done. They got bonuses for not producing, million-dollar bonuses for not producing. Speaking of efficiency, that is some level of incompetence.
In fiscal year 2021-22, the bank also spent twice as much money on bonuses and salaries as it did on projects. This bank is here to finance executives and elites while Canadians are suffering. It makes no sense. At the same time, infrastructure project spending went down by more than half of the previous year and spending on salaries went up by 35%.
Speaking of interest rates, it is really ironic that it is because of the government's failed economic policies and irresponsible spending that the bank's projects have failed. An example of this is the Lake Erie connector project. The bank actually invested $655 million in a $1.7-billion project to build a water electricity cable that is now dead in the water due to financial volatility and inflation. That $655 million was promised to a multi-billion dollar company, Fortis Inc., for an electricity project that ironically failed due to inflation. That inflation was caused by the Liberal government's overspending and reckless spending. A local press release at the time stated:
“ITC made the decision to suspend the project after determining there is not a viable path to achieve successful negotiations and other requirements within the required project schedule. External conditions – including rising inflation, interest rates, and fluctuations in the U.S.-to-Canadian foreign exchange rate – would prevent the company from coming to a customer agreement that would sufficiently capture both the benefits and the costs of the project,” an ITC spokesperson said in a prepared media statement. “As a result, the company believes suspending the project is in the best interest of stakeholders.”
The project failed due to interest rates.
One and a half years ago, the Liberals were gushing about their new partnership with Fortis, a private company that rakes in billions of dollars in revenue every year, promising tons of low-carbon energy, billions in GDP and hundreds of Canadian jobs. Where are those billions? Where are those projects? They never materialized.
Conservatives warned from the beginning that this was a risky and inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars, and we were ignored. We found out later that the bank wasted almost one million taxpayer dollars on consulting and legal fees for an electricity project that never got off the ground. The Lake Erie connector project demonstrates why this bank is an expensive failure. They are spending millions and they cannot get a single project built. At a time when Canadians are struggling to put food on the table, when almost two million Canadians every month are visiting a food bank, the government keeps wasting taxpayer dollars.
In closing, I just want to highlight that the Fortis project was not transparent. We also witnessed very recently the situation at the Fairmont where the bank was—
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- Oct/26/23 12:59:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and speak about the Canada Infrastructure Bank. At the outset, it is important to reflect upon how this bank got started and what promises were made when it was put together.
Thirty-five billion dollars that had been earmarked for infrastructure in municipalities was taken back by the federal government to create this bank. This is money that municipalities needed to build their roads and sewers and upgrade their bridges and everything else. The government took that money and put it in this Infrastructure Bank. The story at the time was that the government was going to attract private investors and was going to leverage taxpayer money probably 11 times.
Here we are now, seven years later. I am sure members thought I was going to say “after eight long years”, but from 2016 to 2023, it is seven years. No projects have been built, and there have been lots of comments about the projects that are on the way to being built. However, as an engineer who worked in building and construction, I would say that if I had been given $35 billion seven years ago, I certainly would have built something by now, instead of just paying large salaries to executives, as we heard my colleague talk about.
In comparison, the Conservatives under Stephen Harper had multiple kinds of infrastructure funds. They spent $53 billion and did 43,000 infrastructure projects in 10 years. Compare that to seven years and zero projects completed, or compare it to some of the other infrastructure projects taken over by the Liberal government.
The Liberals took a pipeline that Kinder Morgan was going to build for $4.5 billion, paid $7 billion for it, and now it has cost $30 billion and it is not finished yet. That is the reason the committee members, when they talked about the Infrastructure Bank, listened to witnesses who were involved in it and invited the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and at the end of the day, the committee had one recommendation. That recommendation was to abolish the bank, because it clearly was not coming anywhere near achieving the goals.
With respect to the money leveraging that was supposed to happen, we can go to the government web page. The government started with $35 billion and now we see that it is $38 billion. The $3 billion extra that came as this great leveraged money is really, over that period of time, a 1.7% increase. It would have been better to put the money in the bank and invest it. The government would have made more money that it has leveraged in this existing Infrastructure Bank.
If we listen to the people who are talking about the good things the Infrastructure Bank could do, it is not that Canada does not have a need for infrastructure. We do not build anything. Under the Liberal government, 18 LNG facilities were cancelled.
Let us talk about broadband. Broadband is something everyone needs. The government has been repeatedly called on to increase the amount of broadband, but again, zero projects have come out of this particular fund.
We need nuclear facilities. We know that to meet the existing electrical demands and to grow, we do not have enough electricity in the grid, and we do not have enough infrastructure in the grid. In my riding of Sarnia—Lambton, we are having a number of new plants built, but we do not have enough electricity or infrastructure there. These are projects that Canada needs to build as a nation.
We hear demands from other places across the country where they need rail infrastructure, places that need airport infrastructure and of course there is the need for pipelines to get our products to one coast or the other.
I am not here to say that we do not need infrastructure. I am just saying the government does not seem to be able to build anything.
We have had much discussion in the House of Commons about the housing crisis in this country, that we have the most land but we have built the fewest houses. In fact, the Liberal government built the same number of houses that were built in 1972, this after recognizing that we are five and a half million spaces short. One would think that if they do not know what to do with the $35 billion in the Infrastructure Bank and there is a huge housing crisis in the country, maybe that is a place to start to funnel that money to municipalities that have plans.
My riding of Sarnia—Lambton has a great plan. It has put $38 million over 10 years into affordable housing and $40 million into maintaining and upgrading existing housing. It also has five projects over five years that will create 2,000 spaces. We are trying to close an affordable housing gap of about 6,500.
Many municipalities have plans, and their plans are different. They could use this money back that is in the Infrastructure Bank, which is busy paying off bonuses to executives and not finishing projects. That is something that should be considered.
We also have a lot of infrastructure needs related to climate change. Shoreline erosion is the first one I would raise. In my riding, we need $150 million to address the shoreline erosion. The member for Cumberland—Colchester was talking to me about the one way of transiting to access the land, which is being eroded, and it would cut off the Atlantic provinces if it were to collapse. It really needs work.
There are needs for infrastructure. We should not be giving all of our money away to build infrastructure in other places, such as to the Asian infrastructure bank, which the Liberals gave $250 million to in order to build pipelines. They are building the piplelines they will not build here in other places.
I always try to bring some positive ideas when I speak in the House. One of the ideas the Liberals might want to try is something being done in my riding, where postwar houses were built structurally to take another level on top. Private mortgagers are giving mortgages to first-time homebuyers to redo the house with an apartment above and an apartment below. This would support the mortgage and triple the amount of housing. Something like that would be a great thing to do with the amount of money that was put in the Infrastructure Bank. Instead, it is a failed initiative.
The one recommendation from committee was to abolish the bank, and I support that.
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- Oct/26/23 2:23:14 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, I will answer the minister’s question for him if he will not bother to do so.
Under no circumstances do these companies deserve any taxpayer money, let alone $17 million. They are being investigated by the RCMP. They did no work for the government, and nobody seems to be able to explain how they got the contract. It is $17 million for these guys but food banks for two million Canadians. That is what we get after eight years of these guys.
How does anyone over there defend this scandal?
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- Oct/26/23 2:54:03 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, my hon. colleague represents the town in which I was born.
This week, I tabled the year's Public Accounts for the Government of Canada to help Canadians better understand how taxpayer dollars are spent. These documents show that we decreased the deficit by 33% when compared to the projection in budget 2022 and we did so without cutting supports for Canadians, like the opposition plans to do.
We have to ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent effectively and prudently. Unlike the Conservatives, we will always fight for Canadians.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to clarify two specific amendments that were actually rejected by the government. Regarding subsection 15(a) of the act, we wanted to list specific sectors necessary to preserve Canada's national security rather than the systematic approach that was recommended by the public servants. We wanted to do that specifically in relation to the testimony given by the member for Whitby. We need to be very careful in light of the strategic and geopolitical issues we are facing. The second amendment relates to section 25.4 of the act, and that would have allowed the Government of Canada to maintain ownership of intangible assets that have been developed in whole or in part by taxpayer-funded research.
Why did the government vote against those two common-sense amendments?
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Madam Speaker, I rise to speak in support of Bill C-290. This is legislation that would strengthen the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act, which provides whistle-blower protections to federal public servants.
The Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act legislation was shepherded by the previous Harper Conservative government in an effort to restore public confidence in the operations of government following one of the biggest corruption scandals in Canadian history, the Liberal sponsorship scandal, a scandal that involved the waste, mismanagement and misappropriation of hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money as part of a quid pro quo scheme, where Liberal insiders received advertising contracts in return for employing Liberal fundraisers, organizers and so on. These contracts were awarded to people who did little or no work and millions of dollars were funnelled into the Liberal Party as part of this scam. It truly was one of the biggest scandals and really shook public confidence and public trust.
In an effort to restore that trust, the Harper government passed the act that provides a mechanism by which federal public servants can bring attention to wrongdoing in a confidential way, including establishing the Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner of Canada, as well as other measures to protect civil servants against reprisals. This bill would build upon the Conservative government's whistle-blower protections by expanding the definition of “wrongdoing” to include political interference. It would expand the powers of the Auditor General in taking disclosures of wrongdoing and undertaking investigations and would expand the scope of those who are protected. It would do other things as well, which have been mentioned in debate on this bill, all of which are positive.
This bill could not be more timely given what we have seen over the past eight years from the Liberals: an unprecedented amount of corruption, waste and mismanagement. In that light, it is not a surprise to learn that the Liberal government, based upon the parliamentary secretary's intervention, is less than enthusiastic about this bill. After all, we have a Prime Minister who was found guilty not once but twice of breaching ethics laws. It was unprecedented and never happened before until the current Prime Minister arrived in office. This is a Prime Minister who obstructed justice to protect the corrupt SNC-Lavalin, a Liberal corporation. He fired his attorney general when she called out his corruption.
We recently learned that the Prime Minister obstructed an RCMP investigation into his potential criminal wrongdoing in SNC-Lavalin and there is, as we speak, an active criminal investigation into the Liberal government's $54-million ArriveCAN app, better known as “arrive scam”. It is $54 million of taxpayers' money that went out the door for an app that does not work, that cost 500 times more than it should have, not to mention well-established evidence of collusion, price-fixing and fraudulent billing to the tune of millions of dollars.
Just when we think we have seen just about enough of Liberal corruption, there is always another Liberal scandal. We are learning of yet another Liberal scandal at the Liberal green slush fund, Sustainable Development Technology Canada, SDTC. Whistle-blowers came forward with evidence of wrongdoing, which prompted a third-party investigation. That investigation, for which forensic accountants went in, resulted in a damning report. The report concludes that tens of millions of taxpayer dollars were handed out to companies that did not qualify. More than that, there have been multiple instances of conflicts of interest at SDTC.
Just to give one an idea, $38.4 million improperly went out the door as part of so-called COVID relief expenditures. Of those companies that received $38.4 million, based on the audits that took place, 29% involved conflict of interest disclosures on the part of board members at SDTC, and not once did any of those board members recuse themselves. The cloud at SDTC is so dark that even this spendthrift Liberal government, which has run up the biggest deficit in Canadian history and doubled the national debt, put a halt and a freeze on spending at SDTC.
The cloud at SDTC, involving tens of millions of dollars and conflicts of interest on the part of a board that is chaired by a Liberal insider, a friend of the Prime Minister, underscores why robust whistle-blower protection legislation is needed.
Many whistle-blowers would reportedly like to come forward with further evidence of wrongdoing at the Liberals' green slush fund but are reluctant to do so. Those who have are also concerned that they could face reprisals because, as it stands, they are not protected under the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act because they are not within the definition of a public servant under the act. Although this bill does provide some additional protection to contractors, it would not protect employees and other whistle-blowers at SDTC who would like to come forward.
I would submit that, while this bill is a significant improvement, we would like to see it strengthened even further to include contractors and those who are at arm's-length from the government to be fully protected. The sordid affair at SDTC, the Liberals' green slush fund, underscores that, to shine a light on the rot and corruption that is so embedded right across this government, additional protections are needed to root out waste, mismanagement and corruption. No one, no federal public servant, contractor or anyone, for that matter, connected to government, should feel intimidated or be concerned about potential reprisals for speaking the truth and calling out waste, mismanagement and corruption.
On that basis, I support the bill, but it could be improved.
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