Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I think it would be good to keep that in. Otherwise, it's just a ubiquitous motion at that point. Much like we heard earlier with Rogers, it's good to have a little something else at the end of it to provide a bit of extra motivation for the government to produce these documents.
At last week's meeting, there was a dump of documents that came that had literally been copied and pasted off the government website and sent in. There was a code of conduct thing that was sent in that was unrelated. We were told they were the documents. Well, no, they were not the briefing documents that were prepared. There's a lot more information that is needed on this.
Let's just look at the witness testimony that Mastercard officials gave when they were at the committee, to address one of your other points. You're making it sound as if this money was needed to secure the data centre in Vancouver. Mastercard officials said, no, they selected Vancouver for a very specific and strategic reason. They were going to build it regardless.
They were a bit cagey about whether they asked for the money or the government approached them and gave them the money. They were more focused on saying this was a job-creating avenue. That was it. They didn't want to say one way or the other.
They said they were building it regardless. When they were asked if anybody else offered them money to build it in their country instead, they said, no, nobody else did. They picked solely Vancouver to be the location to build this data centre.
They also said they had other places around the world that they had built on their own, without government money, in other countries. Why on earth did the minister decide to just randomly chuck $50 million at Mastercard? We need to get the information here to understand it. Was there a request? Was there a specific rationale behind it?
If there wasn't, of course we want to express concern to the House about the value for money that taxpayers got for over $50 million that wasn't needed. Mr. Perkins said one of the richest companies in North America had no need for it because it was building it regardless. It wanted to do it because it knew it needed to do it. It definitely has the wherewithal to be able to build this without taking taxpayers' money.
I think we should keep the wording in there as it is. Based on the witness testimony that we received, there's enough to go on there as well.
We just want to see from the government what the back-and-forth communication was. Whose idea was it to do the $50 million? What was the rationale from the government to do it? We heard from Mastercard that it didn't need it. Why did the government give it $50 million? That's why we need these documents.