It was a mistake with the mute, I think.
Okay, thank you.
When we were trying to regenerate the downtown of my city, we came to realize that there had been a culture that had emerged within certain departments in the local government that was more concerned with enforcing stale rules than with understanding the nature of capital and how capital builds cities, how capital builds infrastructure. I was able to bring some experts to the community to speak to fellow staff members about the role that capital plays in regenerating a downtown and rebuilding a city. That shifted the culture in the institution. As a result of people's understanding capital, understanding the risks of private capital that the people providing that capital go through, the risks they take, we were able to redirect the fortune of my city, and we are now in an incredible renaissance.
I think that maybe some members of this committee could use the same remedial instruction on the importance of capital and the frailties of it when it comes to overexposing proprietary secrets.
I also mentioned on this committee before that I worked on the Boston Big Dig project. That was a $14-billion project that spanned seven miles through the downtown of Boston. Had the lead company, Parsons, Brinckerhoff Quade and Douglas Inc., had to reveal their business case when bidding for that project, that project still wouldn't be built because they would have run away from building what is one of the greatest modern infrastructure projects in contemporary urban history.
What would happen if this motion were passed? Investors, infrastructure companies, and managers of institutional capital in Canada and abroad would see that there is now a new risk that they need to account for on top of all the other ones—pandemics, changing interest rates, and every other financial risk we can imagine that must be accommodated in a business case. They would now need to account for a risk in negotiating and finalizing infrastructure projects with the CIB, knowing that everything they do might wind up on the front page of a newspaper or be broadcast on a publicly viewable Zoom committee meeting. There would now be a new political risk that they would need to account for.
It's unconscionable. How can the Canada Infrastructure Bank negotiate in good faith and sign the confidentiality agreements that are a standard part of any large investment deal, knowing that this committee might try to extract that confidential information from it in violation of its signed commercial contracts? Involving the law clerk and other such propositions won't make a difference to these institutional and private firms. What they will see is their potential investment partner being forced to break the contract that they have signed.
The privileged information section of the Canada Infrastructure Bank Act exists for a very important reason. It exists to give the infrastructure world the confidence that it can deal with the Canada Infrastructure Bank as a good-faith investment partner. It's no coincidence that Export Development Canada, the export bank of Canada, has almost word for word the same provisions in its legislation. The Business Development Bank of Canada, BDC, to name another example, has almost exactly the same provision in its legislation.
Mr. Chair, it's clear that the opposition is using this motion to try to make it appear that the CIB is somehow being evasive or not transparent enough, even though this committee could call whenever we like—as I have mentioned and as my colleagues on the government benches have mentioned—the CEO of the CIB, Ehren Cory, to answer any questions that we might have. Any question that you would like to have answered, the CEO will come and discuss that.
However, the truth is that this motion is designed to cut the knees out from under the CIB—just as it's hitting its stride—for wanton, political point gathering. The CIB has made over half a dozen new investment commitments in just the last six months and is announcing new deals all the time. These investments benefit Canadians. They grow our economy. They get new, important projects off the ground that otherwise might not ever get built—like the Lake Erie Connector—and Canadians end up with cleaner, greener, more-livable communities in which to live, work and thrive.
We heard a point made by one of the members on Tuesday that parliamentary privilege somehow trumps the law by which the CIB works. That may well be, but I'll tell you this: Those infrastructure companies and those private and institutional investors have no idea of what parliamentary privilege is or why it's worth a darn. What they care about is being able to do the work that they have spent years becoming good at, years of learning how to build the infrastructure that keeps Canadian communities going.
If this motion passes, all they'll see is that they signed a contract with the Canada Infrastructure Bank that included commitments by the CIB that they would not share the company's commercially sensitive information with anyone outside the CIB, and now, the parliamentary committee, claiming privilege, is forcing the CIB to break its contract for wanton, partisan, political point-gathering. It's such a travesty and an embarrassment.
That's why I have said before that this motion, should it pass, would have a chilling effect on the CIB's ability to fulfill its mandate and attract private and institutional capital. It introduces political risk that the CIB was specifically designed, specifically conceived of and specifically executed to avoid this very thing. We won't let this opposition try to derail that, so we will continue to oppose this motion.
Thank you, Chair.