Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Just to clarify, INDU is not studying Stellantis. We're in the middle of a very lengthy clause-by-clause discussion on Bill C-27. There was a motion proposed at the end of INDU—they're probably still discussing it now—to have the Minister of Industry appear, but the motion has nothing to do with the contract. They're very different.
The effort on Bill C-27 will probably take us well into the fall, so I don't imagine that there will be another study at industry on this. We had one meeting in camera with officials after we viewed the contract. That's it, and that's not a study. There's not going to be a report either, because it was in camera, just for clarification.
On this, lobbing it off to industry is lobbing it off to a committee that won't get to it until before Christmas. That's not timely when you're spending $52 billion of Canadian money. This committee has the right to look into any spending and spending commitments—government operations is its name, the mighty OGGO, as I'm told—and actual expenditures of the Government of Canada. Some of these expenditures are actual now, particularly the construction ones. The government is already subsidizing half a billion dollars on the construction of the Stellantis plant and investing $778 million dollars of subsidy on the construction of the Volkswagen plant before you even get to the production subsidies. Those are the contracts right now that are in dispute, and the money we're spending is for the construction contracts.
I appreciate not wanting to distract the committee and take time from its important work, but I think that this is the appropriate place to study it, as my friend MP Genuis put forward, because, one, it is a government expenditure, and two, industry can't look at this in the foreseeable future because of the extensive nature of Bill C-27, the privacy and artificial intelligence bill.