Thank you very much.
When the government nationalized the existing Trans Mountain pipeline, it released a statement that said:
To ensure its timely completion, the Government of Canada has reached an agreement with Kinder Morgan to immediately restart construction on the Trans Mountain Expansion Project. The Government of Canada will guarantee financing for the 2018 summer construction season, through a loan guarantee from Export Development Canada. This guarantee will ensure that construction work on the project is restarted without delay.
That was the justification the government offered for a decision that's unprecedented in a generation, to nationalize a massive piece of private sector energy infrastructure at the expense of 4.5 billion Canadian tax dollars, an expense that fell on the shoulders of our taxpayers and is now paying for the construction of pipelines in the United States of America that will compete with Canadian businesses.
Now I see members of the government today trying to absolve Justin Trudeau of his failures on pipelines, and certainly his supporters will try to externalize the failure that this ruling represents. Unfortunately for them, the facts do not support that exoneration. The facts are very clearly to the contrary.
The member across the way called the process flawed. Well, he's right. It was Justin Trudeau's process. It was a process approved by Justin Trudeau's cabinet in 2016, almost half a year after he took office. If he thought the process he inherited did not work, he could have changed it any way he liked. He is the Prime Minister. He is responsible for the machinery of government. He is the head of the Governor in Council, which is the cabinet, and that body had the final decision on this particular proposal. The portion of the consultations with indigenous people with which the court found fault happened months after Trudeau became Prime Minister. It happened entirely under his watch. That, of course, was phase three of the process.
We appreciate that the government is trying to reach back into the past and blame governments that were long out of office when the offending mismanagement occurred. We expect that they will try to blame everybody but themselves, but our job as Parliament is to hold the government accountable, to have ministers come to this committee and explain why the Trudeau government failed to properly consult indigenous people, why it failed to meet its own environmental standards, and why the Governor in Council approved the project with these flaws included, rather than properly executing the consultation and the consideration so that it would be court-approved. We need answers to those questions about this government's failures, failures that occurred exclusively after it took office.
The second reason we need these hearings is to hear the plan. The government said that construction would be “restarted without delay”. That was back in the spring. We're now entering the fall season and we have no idea when shovels will be in the ground. The government has the duty to come before this committee and give us timelines. Eight thousand workers have lost their jobs. Thousands more will suffer. Workers in the oil sands will have less opportunity because the ability to get our product to market has suffered another serious blow under this government. Those workers deserve to know when construction will start and when the project will be completed.
Normally, a government would say that this is, in part, up to private industry because private industry would normally own and operate this kind of infrastructure, but unfortunately we are all the shareholders of this monstrous Liberal boondoggle. The amount of $4.5 billion has already been poured into this project, and that money has not built, and will not build, a single centimetre of new pipeline.
Every additional piece of construction on the expansion, if it ever happens, will come at additional expense to Canadian taxpayers, all for a project that in almost every other advanced country in the world would be funded exclusively and profitably by the private sector.
So we all represent the shareholders and we want a shareholder meeting, because management has failed and $4.5 billion of taxpayer money has now gone out the door for a project that this government cannot even begin to complete because a court found that the Prime Minister's process violated the law and the procedure necessary for it to occur. If the government has nothing to hide, then it should have nothing to fear in bringing management for this project before this esteemed committee to answer questions on behalf of the taxpayers who are footing the bill and the workers who are out of jobs because of this failure. So I support shadow minister Stubbs in her motion, and I will be voting in favour of it.