He says it's commercial confidentiality, but I think the reason the minister wants to be in camera is that he's actually going to be embarrassed by the fact that he claimed in the House.... This goes to the issue of ministerial accountability, which is what this subamendment is about. It's about ministerial accountability. Even the minister of industry has said in the House that this enormous, unprecedented Volkswagen taxpayer subsidy by the Government of Canada has an ROI—a return on investment, as it's known—of five years.
I'm curious about that. I did spend 20 some years in the private sector and I know that a return on investment is when you make the investment and then you actually make a profit on that investment.
Now, in order for the government to even get that basic return of that money in five years, the plant would actually have to be open. Until the plant is open, the plant is not producing revenue. I don't see how, on a plant that the minister by his own words said will take five years to build, it can have a five-year return on investment.
This is the kind of question we need to ask the Minister of Finance—whether she agrees with the Minister of Industry that there is a five-year return on investment on a $14-billion contract subsidizing a company that has the same revenue as the Government of Canada while at the same time producing no revenue and no batteries for the next five years; that somehow it magically produces it. Maybe that's why we know that the Minister of Industry was actually a corporate lawyer and not a person delivering a P and L statement, or profit and loss, for companies. I think he missed his math there.
At the industry committee last week, we asked the minister for a copy of that ROI report that he so proudly claimed in the House of Commons existed—that there was an ROI report and that the bureaucrats and department had done this amazing work to say that we will get this money paid back within five years. Do you know what the minister's answer was there? He actually came to committee. We invited the minister to come to committee, and he came to committee. When we posed that question to him of whether or not there was an actual report, as he claimed, he said, well, it's the Trillium report.
Now, if you had a computer in front of you, I could give you the URL for the Trillium report. It's a report by a think tank in Ontario, as they're called, to the Ontario government about what the electric vehicle manufacturing industry could be worth in Ontario on theoretical grounds. If the fairy dust got spread here, and the fairy dust got spread there, and we had this part of the manufacturing process here, and we had this assembly of the process there, and if the stars lined up, and if all things worked out, somehow there would be this massive job creation between now and 2050 in Ontario.
Do you know what? I read that report again last night in preparing for this committee, and do you know what I found in that report? The report is called, “Electric Vehicles: a $48 billion opportunity for Canada”. It sounds like something this government would write, because the bigger the number, the more impressive the announcement is. I read though this report twice. I did a word search, which you can do on a PDF, and I didn't find the word “Volkswagen” once in that report. I don't understand how the minister says this is the report that is publicly available that supports his contention that there is a five-year return on investment on this $14-billion investment in Volkswagen for a plant that won't even open for five years. He says it's right there in that report. I searched it. I guess that's why we're going to have the minister back. We will have the minister back for two hours to talk about this contract.
I would like to ask the Minister of Finance if she knows of a different way to calculate a return on investment. Perhaps it's not the one they teach in business school. Perhaps it's not the one that every company uses in trying to figure out whether they should make a capital investment. Perhaps this Minister of Finance from her journalistic career—not business career, because she didn't have one—has a different definition of what a return on investment is. Perhaps she learned it from the Prime Minister, who said that budgets balance themselves. As we know, apparently they don't.
When you look at this very large Bill C-47—I'll hold it up for people to see—this budget implementation bill that implements 51 act changes, including the symbol of the crown for the King—