Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to add a few thoughts to this as well.
I think it's quite clear, and I think Charlie was correct, that the government is clearly trying to filibuster. They don't want to have their failure on the Trans Mountain pipeline brought up in the House of Commons. That's why they're trying to kick this down the road as far as they possibly can and just hope that maybe if something happens—I don't know; maybe an election—it would prevent it from happening, or maybe they want to prorogue Parliament. Maybe that would be something that would happen as well. Who knows?
We know that their clearly stated objective is to delay this motion as long as they possibly can. My hope is that we can get to the point of passing the original motion, as it was written, or as we have it before us, without any further amendment.
When you look at the cost that's tied on to this, $34 billion, the PBO was pretty clear.... It's not the first time that a committee has requested a Parliamentary Budget Officer's report to be concurred in prior to a committee study being finished. We see this every now and then from different committees.
This report is a pretty substantive report. Any time you're talking about $34 billion, that's enough of a report in and of itself. If the Parliamentary Budget Officer has made the case that the government stands to take a loss, that should be a five-alarm fire for everybody, regardless of their feelings.
I absolutely think that we should be having a debate as soon as we can get one on the government's handling of the pipeline and the finances of it, as per the PBO report, and I'd like to see that happen tomorrow if we could. I know that's not going to happen, but that's the kind of urgency that we should see with this issue.
I would think the government would want to get up and speak to it as well, as soon as possible, and not want to wait 120 days. I think for them it would be urgent to try to build confidence with Canadians. I think the fact that they want to kick it down the road shows just how scared they are to have that debate. They know that they can't defend their record on it because they know that it's been an absolute failure, even just on the financial side, let alone other issues here.
I'm ready to vote and I hope we can pass the original motion.