Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Obviously I disagree entirely with the way that Mr. Fillmore has characterized this motion. I will give him the benefit of the doubt on the concerns that he may have about a third party group, a private company, being told that certain aspects of the legislation would apply. In that light, I'm trying to consider whether or not I could support that.
The concern I have is that we have seen in so many other committees and so many other instances that the government has used cover in that type of thing to prevent disclosure where disclosure is warranted, and it has kind of stretched the application and the meaning of that.
I really do believe that it's very important that we have a clean motion here because, as it relates to the project, the types of information that would have been provided to the CIB would have been linked to the project. This is a private sector company. This is a company that is owned by Fortis Inc., which is massive.
I don't want to repeat myself, but I want members to appreciate the fact that this is a company that clearly has a great credit rating and has strong revenues, yet they have been offered this kind of deal from the government. They've been given $655 million. We don't yet know exactly if that is a loan. Is that a loan at market rates? If so, why did the government have to be the one to offer that loan? We don't know if this is some kind of debt/equity swap here. There are a lot of different tools that the investment community uses to structure these types of deals. We don't know what the taxpayer exposure is on this. We don't know what the ownership structure is going forward.
I'm inclined to be supportive of a motion that would be less restrictive. I look at what other committees have done when they are looking to get things.... The law would allow for redaction. It is very important to home in on that. Any time a committee asks for unredacted information, it's because there are laws that allow the government to withhold that information from the public, and the whole purpose of having a motion calling for unredacted documents is precisely to say, look, the committee needs to get to the bottom of this.
Also, let me remind you that it was the government that wrote the Canada Infrastructure Bank enabling legislation. I don't believe it is appropriate to give that kind of cover to a structure, a $35-billion bank, where this government wrote into the enabling legislation elements to prevent full disclosure and transparency.
I think my NDP colleague and my Bloc colleague put it very well. When these deals are structured between other levels of government where it's public infrastructure, where the public owns the asset or operates it, there's a great deal of disclosure, because you have provincial, municipal and federal access to information and legislation. Here, we have a situation where it's exactly the opposite. We would not protect the Government of Quebec, the Government of Ontario or the Government of Saskatchewan from not having to fully divulge the information about their involvement in these projects, so why would we protect a private company?