Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I just want to address a few of the comments that were made by the Liberal member who had the floor a few moments ago.
This notion that there is some obligation for Canadian taxpayers to be kept in the dark about this deal is just so bogus. There are lots of occasions when it's appropriate and necessary to keep some details from the public when the government is interacting with certain suppliers, vendors, people, or companies who win bids or contracts for various aspects.
You can imagine a supplier that comes from the defence industry being hesitant about sharing every aspect of a contract as it relates to subcontractors or where they source primary material from. When the government puts out a call for bids for something, either an infrastructure piece or a procurement piece, you might say “Well, you know if the government is inviting other companies to bid on things and then entering into an agreement, because that company does other work with other competitors, we wouldn't want every aspect of how they arrived at their final contract or their final bid made public because that might do some kind of commercial harm to the company that's bidding.”
But this is a different case altogether. This isn't that the government has put out an open call for bids, a competitive process under which every company that had expertise or capability had the opportunity to bid, with independent objective public service experts analyzing and scoring each application based on an agreed-upon set of objective criteria. This is the government entering into basically what amounts to a sole-source contract. They decided they would enter into this agreement with Stellantis in one case and Northvolt in another.
They are using almost $50 billion of taxpayers' money to underwrite these assembly plants, and in so doing they've made the Canadian taxpayer a partner, or certainly at the very least a shareholder in this enterprise. Every Canadian who pays taxes will have to pay for part of this contract. So, just as any other business would have to answer to its shareholders as to where the board or where the CEO is spending money, so too is it appropriate on the taxpayer side here.
We have a situation in which we only found out about this problem months after the original announcement was made. The Liberal from the Windsor area, who had the floor before me, says he's proud of this and that this is great news. Well, if he's so proud of it, he should show his work. Let's stick the contract on the fridge with a big sticker on it. If he's so proud of it, let's let everyone take a look at it. But he's not doing that.
At every step along the way, the government has asked us to just trust them. As soon as this deal was announced, Conservatives asked to see the contract. We simply put out there that we just want to be able to evaluate, to do our due diligence as an oversight body. Whether it's this committee or Parliament in general, we just want to take a look at the contract to decide for ourselves and to allow Canadians to decide for themselves whether or not they believe it's a good deal, whether or not they believe that there are adequate safeguards for Canadian jobs, and whether or not they believe that there will be the return on investment that was promised. The government refused. They asked us to just trust them. They refused to make the contract public, and then reports came out about the foreign replacement workers.
This brings me to the point by the member from the Bloc and where I would respectfully disagree with this amendment. We know today that there is a problem with foreign replacement workers. Because of these reports and other avenues, this information has come to light. That's why we're focused on replacement workers specifically.
However, there could be other aspects of the contract that don't adequately protect the taxpayers' investment in a whole variety of areas that we might never know about if we don't see the contract. We might find out about something months after this study is over, when another whistle-blower calls out an aspect of this deal that disadvantages Canadian workers or Canadian taxpayers.
As my colleague Mr. Perkins pointed out, as legislators, we all see legislation in which there are cross-references to other acts and other sections. There are all kinds of scenarios we could imagine, where if we only got a limited number of sections on a piece of legislation.... It might reference other portions of an act. It might reference other acts that we would not necessarily have in front of us without going to find them all.
The analogy I'm trying to make is that within a contract, there could very well be aspects that speak specifically to replacement workers or job guarantees, but might reference other sections that we would never have access to. We would never have a full picture of what's actually being presented, or what may or may not be safeguarded. That's why we really need the whole piece. In order to evaluate any given clause or any given section that might just narrowly touch on workers, we really need to be able to see that as part of a comprehensive piece to make a real evaluation.
It's the same thing when we analyze a proposed piece of legislation. When the government comes in and tables a bill, many of the sections might just be one or two lines about an amendment to another act. What do we do? We all go and see what the other act says. We look at that to say, “Okay. This section of this bill amends that section in this way.” We have them both in front of us and we come to a decision. We come to a more informed decision when we're aware of not just what's in front of us, but other related topics that are covered in other bills and other acts. That's the analogy I'm trying to make about solely focusing narrowly on what the Bloc amendment would give effect to.
For those reasons, I would urge my colleague, respectfully, to take a look at that and wonder if we don't.... Rather than really getting to the bottom of this multi-billion dollar deal.... I think we have to really think about that, too. For my Liberal colleagues who keep hiding behind protecting their corporate friends, we have to consider this in the scale. These are—