Government Operations Committee on Nov. 27th, 2023

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

We have received it. We just need to tweak some translation issues, so bear with us for a few seconds.

I've started a speaking list already on the amendment.

I have Mr. Perkins, Mr. Genuis, and then Mr. Scheer.

The amendment is going out now. We have four people on the speaking list.

We could probably start with Mr. Perkins on the amendment unless you wish to wait to have everyone receive it.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Yes. Can we have...?

We might want to suspend for a couple of minutes to read it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

It's a very simple one. She read it into the record, but it will come out right now.

Go ahead, Mr. Perkins.

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for proposing to try to find a way through this. I appreciate the intent, but I can't support it for the following reasons.

Earlier, I mentioned that.... I'm just looking around the table. I'm the only one here who's actually read the Volkswagen contract. As I said, the minister said these are mirrored contracts based on the IRA, and they have similar terms. We know Stellantis threatened to leave, because its initial construction announcement happened before the IRA was brought in, and then the IRA happened—President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act—which contained EV battery production subsidies.

The Volkswagen contract was negotiated in the context post-IRA, whereas the Stellantis original contract was done in the context prior to that. As a result—quite rightly so, I think—Stellantis said, “Hey, guys. We're not on a level playing field here. You can't be saying that we don't get that similar treatment when Volkswagen is getting it. If we go to the U.S., we'll get that treatment, but if we stay here, we won't get it. Everyone who goes to the U.S. can get it and Volkswagen will get it here.”

With that in mind, it put the construction at bay. While the mirror agreement, or the agreement that's similar.... I'm assuming, based on the production numbers and the PBO report, that it's similar.

I am going to say one thing about what's in the VW contract about the issue of public release. The VW contract says the contract can be released publicly, but before it gets released publicly, the government must seek VW's consent to protect only the things that are commercially sensitive to Volkswagen. There's no ability of the government to redact the things that it thinks are politically sensitive, like the section around the lack of commitment to Canadian jobs. It can't exempt that out of some political narrative. The Volkswagen contract says only the company can, and it can do it only for commercially sensitive reasons.

There were three sections redacted when we saw it. There was the section on the number of batteries to be produced every year, but it wasn't difficult to figure out. For some strange reason, the section on the construction contracts of the plant was redacted. VW thought that was commercially sensitive.

Volkswagen, knowing that a bunch of politicians were going to be looking at this contract, didn't redact the sections around jobs. It didn't redact the sections around the out clauses to meet those commitments on the jobs. It didn't redact the section around establishing a battery recycling ecosystem.

None of those things were redacted by Volkswagen. All that was redacted was the annual production number, which it said was an average.

That's the same contract that the Parliamentary Budget Officer looked at and wrote two reports on. I believe he has actually seen the Stellantis contract as well. When we had him before the committee, he confirmed that it was basically the same.

The problem here is that the Bloc are trying to pick out of the contract the things they think need to be released in a contract they haven't seen. I don't think that's the role of parliamentarians. I don't think it's the role of the opposition. I don't think it's the role of the government. It's certainly not the role of the government in the terms of the contract. It's not the role of the Bloc to determine what clause gets released in a contract they haven't seen.

On the contract subsidizing the Northvolt,a Swedish company, with foreign replacement replacement workers, in the Bloc Québécois' leader's riding, apparently they don't want to see the terms that make sure that they get.... I say this because employment contracts can be in one spot and they can be in another—and by the way, there are two contracts. There's not one. There are two for each of these, so we have to make sure that people understand that it's both the construction contract and the strategic investment fund of ISED that pay for the government subsidy on the construction, and then there's the production subsidy contract.

Both have job commitments, job commitments for construction, job commitments for permanent jobs, and they're identical, I'd suspect, and they're probably identical in the fact that they don't mention the words “Canadian job”. Otherwise they'd be releasing them.

So there are other sections in these two contracts that deal with employment and other terms and clauses.... If you don't ask for the right clauses you will not find all the outs that are in the contract that allow the commercial company, the auto company, to actually get out of those job commitments. If you don't ask for the right stuff.... And I can tell you from the Bloc motion, they aren't asking for the right stuff to get to the bottom of whether or not the Bloc Québécois leader's riding will be inundated with Swedish workers.

By the way, I'll read to you from the Saturday article that came out on Radio-Canada. Let me find the right article, there are just so many articles, there are so many conflicting job numbers from conflicting people from the government through the proponents. In this article, which came out on November 24, for the Quebec project the Swedish company says that “it is too early to be able to quantify the number of experts we will need with precision, but to give an order of magnitude, it will be a few hundred of people”.

So you can guarantee that in the Bloc Québécois' leader's riding, there are going to be at least a few hundred foreign replacement workers, not jobs for Quebeckers. You can expect the same at the St. Thomas plant and the Windsor plants, as we know there will be 1600 workers from South Korea. And, by the way, at the second plant in Quebec, guess who the partner company on that is. It's a Korean company. It's a Korean company, so you can expect Swedish workers and you can expect foreign replacement workers in both those Quebec plants from Sweden and from South Korea the same the way they've done it.

Anyway, I would say going forward that trying to ask for one particular thing out of a complex contract won't get you to where you want to go. Let the company—as they have the power—decide what is commercially sensitive to them, not to the government. Let them choose as is the term of the contract what is sensitive to them. Who are we to choose what is sensitive for Ford, Stellantis or NextStar or subsidiaries here or for Northvolt or for Volkswagen?

I think with MP Masse's addition and the vote obviously that was made, I personally think it's still.... Obviously, I'm not going to rehash paragraphs (g) and (h) because we know that the government ignored this committee's document production requirements for the McKinsey reports. I have no confidence that they aren't going to do it again here and that's why we need to ask for the release of the whole contract because you don't know what to ask for if you are trying to narrow it down. Let the company decide what is sensitive, as the terms of the contract enable them to do, and not the government.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you, Mr. Perkins.

Mr. Genuis, please.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Just before I begin, I wonder if you could share the existing speaking list with us.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

On the amendment it's you, Mr. Scheer and then Mrs. Vignola.

[Charles Sousa, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

On the amendment, that's what I'm talking about.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Would you like to be added to the list for the amendment?

[Charles Sousa, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

You were on the speaking list for the original motion, not the amendment.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

I suspect, based on past precedent, we will go far beyond the amendment as well, Chair, and that may be the source of the confusion from the member opposite.

Chair, Conservatives want to get this complete, and we want to get the contracts. It's a simple proposition. The public is paying for this, and the public should, generally speaking, have access to the contracts.

I hope that the Bloc might reconsider the amendment, because it really vandalizes the whole project, as far as I'm concerned. With a relatively small number of words, it changes the whole meaning of what we're doing here. Instead of asking for the contracts such that we could look at the contracts, understand them and get to the bottom of their implications in the fullest sense, it moves us towards requesting a narrow set of provisions that specifically name certain things that relate to the hiring of foreign workers such as language requirements and language of work.

There may be aspects of these contracts that have an impact on those things but do not, specifically, touch on the criteria that were mentioned. I think that it is reasonable to look at the whole contract to be able to understand what the effects of the contracts are in totality in terms of Canadian workers. That's what we're trying to establish.

We know that this public subsidy is leading to the employment of hundreds, at least, of foreign replacement workers, and getting to the bottom of this requires not just looking at provisions that might specifically mention foreign replacement workers. I'm not an expert in this area like my colleague Mr. Perkins is, but I suspect that they didn't write directly into the contracts the exact number of replacement workers. I suspect that the government, foreseeing this possibility, was cryptic enough in their language or simply didn't insert the necessary protections to ensure that Canadian workers were involved.

It may not be so much a question of what's in the contract but what's not in the contract. We can only establish conclusions based on what's not in the contract if we see the whole contract. If we see the whole contract, then we can say that there's nothing in the contract that provides for X, Y and Z. If we only see part of a contract, we have no way of establishing that. We have no way of establishing what's not in the contract unless we see the whole contract. I think that follows fairly clearly and fairly logically. We have no way of establishing what's not in the contract unless we first see the whole contract so we can identify what's absent. If we only see half of the contract or less, then there may be other things in the contract that you're not seeing. It completely negates and undercuts the entire purpose of this motion.

In fact, on that basis, Chair, I would even want to inquire if this amendment is even in order, because I think there are rules that prohibit negation amendments. I'll leave it to you to rule on whether that is a matter of order in terms of this being effective negation of the intent of the original motion. Whether it is so formally, I certainly think that it is so substantively, and it's certainly not something that we can support. It undermines the whole project that we've spent the day trying to work on, which is trying to understand what's going on here and delivering transparency for taxpayers. It negates and undermines the whole purpose of this exercise.

I may have more to say on this but, for the time being, I'll leave my remarks there. I do hope that some common sense will prevail, at least on the opposition side, and that we'll be able to have a motion. We've already lost some of the provisions, but the main goal is that we need to be able to get the contracts, or there's just no point.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

We'll go to Mr. Scheer now.

[Andrew Scheer, Conservative, Regina—Qu'Appelle, SK]

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—

[Rick Perkins, Conservative, South Shore—St. Margarets, NS]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

I'm sorry to interrupt my colleague, the House leader, but I'm still contemplating the point that MP Genuis made earlier, which is.... I actually don't believe this amendment's in order, because it takes out the requirement to release the contract and replaces it with one narrow thing, which is anything mentioning temporary foreign workers. That's all that would be released. I can tell you the contract doesn't mention temporary foreign workers. I can guarantee you that. There's also a French language element.

I think it's out of order because it's a substantive change that changes the very nature of the motion itself from the full contract to one minor aspect of employment.

Perhaps Mr. Genuis might have more to add on that point.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thanks.

I've been chatting with the clerk during Mr. Scheer's talk, and we have been talking about Mr. Genuis' comments about it being out of order. I'm reading it the same way as the clerk, which is differently from you, so if you don't mind, I'm going to suspend for a couple of seconds to discuss the out of order issue.

We're also reading the French version. I want to make sure that we're all reading the same thing and the same intent of the motion. We'll suspend for a few moments and then we'll go back to Mr. Scheer.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Colleagues, we are back in session.

Thank you for your patience, everyone.

I am getting an indication from Mrs. Vignola that she wishes to withdraw her amendment. We have a general understanding of the language issue. She's putting forward a request to withdraw her motion.

Do we have agreement?

[Charles Sousa, Liberal, Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON]

I'm sorry. What is she doing?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

She's withdrawing her amendment.

Are we fine with that?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

(Amendment withdrawn)

The floor goes back to Mrs. Vignola.

Go ahead, please.

[Julie Vignola, Bloc, Beauport—Limoilou, QC]

Thank you for letting me withdraw the amendment.

To remove any ambiguity, I propose the following in the same paragraph: “an order do issue for the production of copies of any contract, memorandum of understanding or any other agreement between a minister, department, agency or Crown corporation of the Government of Canada, including any provision that relates to the hiring and use of foreign workers and that relates to language requirements and language of work”.

Is it clearer to everyone now?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Let me check with our clerk, please.

I'll have the clerk read it in English, as well, to make sure that we're all on the same page.

[Majid Jowhari, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

I believe that the motion that Mrs. Vignola is putting forward has the two parts, with paragraphs (g) and (h) still in it. I think that needs to be withdrawn.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

No, I have mentioned that already. The clerk says that does not.