Transport Committee on June 16th, 2020

Evidence of meeting #7 for Transport, Infrastructure and Communities in the 43rd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was projects.

A recording is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

Meeting Requested by Four Members of the Committee to Discuss their Request to Undertake a Study of Ministers' Spending Priorities

Ministers' Spending Priorities

MPs speaking

Xavier Barsalou-Duval

Also speaking

Michael Keenan Deputy Minister, Department of Transport

Kelly Gillis Deputy Minister, Infrastructure and Communities, Office of Infrastructure of Canada

1 p.m.

NDP

Taylor Bachrach NDP Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC

Minister, I have one more question, and I'm concerned that I'm going to run out of time. Thank you for that little bit of information.

I'm still concerned about the Parliamentary Budget Officer's not being able to obtain all the details on tens of thousands of infrastructure projects. In the House, you mentioned that some of these projects are confidential. I'm concerned because it seems to me that the Parliamentary Budget Officer should be able, as an officer of Parliament, to look at confidential details. Is that not the case? He's just looking for proof. He says that he believes they exist, but that “It's hard to be convinced. I have faith they do exist, but I don't have [any] proof...”. Is there some way that your department can provide the PBO with proof that these projects exist?

1 p.m.

Liberal

Catherine McKenna Liberal Ottawa Centre, ON

It's important that Canadians understand that we've provided information about all of the projects, so on 33,000 projects, we have detailed information.

I know the member would care greatly about this. When we talk about CMHC projects, those are under bilateral agreements. We've provided information on a whole range of those projects, but provinces and territories, to protect the privacy of individuals and the security of survivors of domestic violence, give us aggregated claim information for some projects. They do not provide project-level detail, but their claim information is audited by a third party. In the interest of transparency, we've included these taxpayer-funded projects in our overall count. It's important to recognize that the information really lies with the provinces and territories.

As I say, in these cases, for some of the CMHC projects, the information is not provided disaggregated to us because the provinces and territories do not want to be providing us with information that would impede the privacy of individuals and the security of survivors. This has been transmitted to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

Maybe my deputy might like to add to that.

1 p.m.

Deputy Minister, Infrastructure and Communities, Office of Infrastructure of Canada

Kelly Gillis

Again, with what the minister had said, we've provided the Parliamentary Budget Officer with all of the information at the aggregate level from CMHC to support the information in the expenditure, which is audited. We also provided the Parliamentary Budget Officer with the information on the gas tax, because 12,000 of the projects relate to the approximate spending or the approximate projects from the gas tax annually—the $2.2 billion that is expended on that fund—that support communities across the country.