Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I do want to make some remarks, but I want to begin by saying thank you to the witnesses who joined us and shared their wisdom with us tonight. It's much appreciated.
I guess the first thing I'd ask is whether Mr. Scheer consulted with Ms. Kusie. We just passed a motion by Ms. Kusie on how to best spend the time of this committee, and here we are with another Conservative motion thwarting the intention of how this committee should best spend its time.
I want to carry on. We've had some interesting debate on this motion. Unfortunately, it's been very time-consuming. It's left witnesses who have prepared for the meeting unable then to speak. We did a little bit better today. Unfortunately, we're still leaving maybe an hour on the table that we're not going to be able to have with the witnesses.
I really have been reflecting on the motion and the motivations behind it. The more I thought about it, the plainer it became that this is simply a motion that we can't support.
I know we've moved some amendments that have tried to make marginal improvements to the motion, but they've been just that—marginal. We've been tinkering at the margins.
We tried to make changes to a completely unreasonable deadline for a request that will run into the thousands of pages for a document production order. We tried to make an amendment to make sure we respect official languages in how this motion would be responded to, given the importance that we all place on ensuring that both of our official languages are respected and that official language laws are always followed at the federal government level. We even tried to make amendments to ensure that our committee is not asking the Canada Infrastructure Bank to violate its own statute.
At the end of the day, those amendments—even if they all got passed—would only serve to make slight improvements to what is a fundamentally flawed motion, and one that we simply cannot support.
The point is that this motion has been designed to sabotage the Canada Infrastructure Bank's ability to fulfill its mandate, which is to attract private and institutional capital to get more projects built across the country to benefit Canadians.
We heard, even this evening, testimony from a witness who twice brought up the importance of attracting private capital to investments in public infrastructure in Canada, and the necessity of that, the ability to appear attractive and to bring investment partners online for projects of scale that are important to job creation, and to moving toward a low-carbon economy and toward creating an inclusive economy. Yet here we are, persisting with a motion to sabotage the CIB.
The CIB is investing in important projects all across the country, such as the biggest public transit project in Quebec in the last half-century, the Réseau express métropolitain, the REM, in Montreal; projects like the Alberta irrigation infrastructure project, helping to make farmland more productive and to enhance Canada's food security and strengthen our homegrown agricultural industry; and projects like the very topic we are discussing with the excellent witnesses we have with us right now, the Erie Connector, the subject of this motion and project that will reduce Ontarians' electricity costs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create jobs.
This motion is meant to put a stop to projects like these, by harming the Canada Infrastructure Bank's ability to attract the very private and institutional capital that is at the heart of the CIB's mandate to make Canadian tax dollars go further, as underscored by tonight's witnesses.
The Conservatives claim to be on the taxpayers' side, but it's hard to see how, when they are trying to sabotage the CIB's ability to make every tax dollar get more built for our citizens. This motion is an attempt to drag confidential business information from the Canada Infrastructure Bank's investment and project proponent partners into a partisan committee where it can be used and misused for political purposes by the opposition.
As I said on Tuesday, it grieves me to see the other opposition parties following the Conservatives' lead on this. It's really unfortunate. It's an attempt to destroy the independent and apolitical status of the Canada Infrastructure Bank, an institution that is intentionally insulated, through its statute, from political interference so that we can actually attract that private and institutional capital in an unhindered and unimpeded way.
I'm going to share with you that in one of the places where I was a city planner over my long career trying to build communities and build infrastructure, my observation was that many of my colleagues were—