Thank you, Chair.
I just want to highlight that this investigation is not about casting the CIB in a certain light. It's really about bringing transparency to Canadians who are asking a lot of questions about what happened and who have a genuine interest in knowing what happened and knowing the story behind how the contract got sent over to Beijing.
In question period, when this contract first came up, it was revealed that a Chinese shipyard got the contract. The former minister, Minister Freeland, brushed this off as a provincial matter and said that they only fund operations, but at the very same time, her staff were emailing the Prime Minister's Office about how to manage the CIB loan announcement. Parliament was, in some sense, misled.
Canadians expect the truth from their government, not political positioning to cover for some aspect of what appears to be incompetence. That's why these documents need to be disclosed to the public, and the study needs to happen.
The Liberals also told Canadians that Ottawa knew nothing and had nothing to do with the BC Ferries' Chinese state-owned shipyard contract. However, now we know that the Canada Infrastructure Bank—a federal Crown corporation—actually bankrolled and subsidized the interest rates. It gave interest rates for contracts far below rates that Canadians can secure on their own. This is of serious interest to the Canadian public.
Instead of transparency, Liberals chose to deflect, deny and almost spin what had happened. Canadians deserve transparency to know why their tax dollars are being invested in a Chinese-owned shipyard and not in their own shipyard industries and workers.
In addition, the Canada Infrastructure Bank was supposed to invest in Canadian infrastructure. Instead, it gave a billion-dollar loan for ships built in China with zero Canadian content requirements. That's not building Canada for Canadians, that's really building Beijing. Why wasn't a single question asked of the CIB about protecting Canadian jobs and shipyards before signing the cheque?
Canadians also need to know more about the timeline of events and how it was only in June that we found out that the contract was going to the Chinese shipyard, when decisions were made fairly early in January. Also, why did the CIB not publicly announce the deal before they signed the cheque, and why did they wait so long before announcing it? Those are other questions that Canadians are curious about.