Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I, too, want to add my comments to this meeting and why we're here.
I want to start by indicating that I think the prime ministership of Justin Trudeau will be marked as a time of failure. It will go down in history as a period of failure: failure to balance the budget, failure to reduce debt, failure on the international stage, failure with trade agreements, failure to establish a plan for illegal migrants crossing our borders, and now, failure to develop our nature resources and to build pipelines.
We find ourselves in a situation in which, not that many months ago, we had an American-based company, Kinder Morgan, wanting to expand its pipelines to accommodate the sale of our natural resources to Asian markets, where we don't have to take a discounted price of 50ยข on the dollar but can sell it at market price. They wanted to build a pipeline that would enable our resource companies to sell our natural resources for what they're worth. All they were asking for was the approval of an expansion project. They wanted the Liberal government to help them go through the regulatory process to get approval to build the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.
Instead, contrary to what the members on the other side say about moving forward with confidence, we have a government that moved forward with arrogance and bought this pipeline. It was an unnecessary purchase, $4.5 billion for a pipeline that was valued at $2.5 billion on the existing owner's books. That $4.5 billion didn't build one centimetre of new pipe. It paid for the right to operate the existing pipe and to apply to build an additional pipe. With arrogance, this government proceeded to seek the approval of building this expansion without having properly gone through the process required by the regulatory governing bodies to get this approval, and without proper consultation with first nations. They say there is no more important relationship than that with our indigenous peoples. The courts have found that they failed to properly consult and they also failed to properly take into consideration the environmental issues associated with increased tanker traffic.
This Liberal government under the leadership of Justin Trudeau is an utter failure on almost everything it does. This is just another example.
As a committee, it's very important that we take this time, immediately, to find out what has happened, what has gone wrong, and what the plan to move forward will be, so that we can get our 8,000 construction workers back on the job building pipelines, and put our energy workers back on the job creating energy and selling our energy to international markets.
I want to strongly echo my support for shadow minister Stubbs' motion here today.