Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I know that we heard some of these arguments at the last meeting. It's not going to surprise members that I'm not swayed by Liberal members who are advocating for secrecy around this deal. The only shareholder in the Canada Infrastructure Bank is the Canadian government—it's the Canadian taxpayer. The government is right to say this is the first of its kind, because the Canada Infrastructure Bank has so far been unable to complete a single project; and as the Parliamentary Budget Officer has told us, the projects that it has announced so far do not include private sector money.
Now, here we have a situation where the bank is subsidizing a project that will primarily benefit a private company that is owned by another company, Fortis Inc., which made $9 billion in revenue and paid out over $800 million to its shareholders. I don't need to repeat the staggering financial position of Fortis Inc. It's in a very positive position in terms of cash flow, in terms of revenue, in terms of bragging about increasing its dividend every year; and it decided not to put any extra money into this proposal.
Ms. Jaczek talked about how this project is going to be so good for Ontario. The Ontario government hasn't put any money into this project. If the Ontario government has decided not to put its skin in the game, what does that tell us about the project? The problem here is that we don't know a lot of details about it. I think it's incumbent upon this committee to have that detail.
This amendment is about the timeline. I'm looking at the calendar, and I think 45 days puts us awfully close to the end of the parliamentary session. I think it's very important that this committee have this data before the House rises, before the government can get out of, or dodge this, so to speak. If there are things that come out of this deal that opposition parties, or even government backbenchers, decide they'd like to know more about, we lose so many parliamentary tools at our disposal.
I'm willing to meet the government. I think Mr. Bachrach had an idea last week of 30 days. That is eminently possible. I know the government's trying to talk about how much work this will be for translators and how much documentation could be provided. We've all been at committee or heard about other work done by committees where they have had much tighter timelines on much bigger projects. The House of Commons translation staff is excellent. It has very quick turnaround times.
We're not talking about digging back into the archives. This is not a cold-case file exercise where we have to find the keys to the basement and go downstairs with the flashlight and dust off the microfiche machines. This is a current project. All of this information would be on deposit, at the CIB. They've just gone through whatever work they have done to approve this project.
I think the need for a longer timeline is a complete red herring. I think 30 days is eminently reasonable. It does give the bank more time. As I said at the last meeting, if the Infrastructure Bank comes back to this committee with a compelling reason that it hasn't been able to fulfill this order, or if the translation staff at the House of Commons tells this committee that there's some impediment to meeting that deadline, then this committee can evaluate that. But I would like to stick to the 30-day deadline so that we can ensure that we get this information back before the House rises.