Thank you.
I'll start out by responding to some of the points made by Mr. Greaves. They rely on a series of logical fallacies, to put it kindly.
His first point is that somehow, if in fact we don't buy this ferry from a Chinese contractor, we can't have a ferry. That's simply untrue. The Liberals may not believe in Canadian manufacturing, but Conservatives do. We believe that those ferries can be built by Canadian hands with Canadian steel. They may not believe that's true, but we do.
Second, he says, well, there's no federal control, no federal relationship, with BC Ferries. That's untrue. The CIB, of course, is underwriting it in terms of $1 billion. That's a Crown corporation. If Crown corporations aren't responsible to taxpayers, who are they responsible to? As well, numerous times in the documents—I can provide you with the citations—federal bureaucrats talked about the federal flows that are coming directly to BC Ferries. Quite frankly, one of the reasons we need to have further conversations about this is the fact that a lot of those documents get to a certain point and then they're redacted. There are literally hundreds of pages of redactions. I would like to know what's under there. There might be some information in there that is commercially sensitive, and that's fine, but we need to test that evidence.
Then he asks why we're asking for former minister Freeland when we really should have the housing minister. Add him. We're happy to have him come and have him discuss again some of the redactions as well. We will gladly accept that amendment to add that minister.
The reality is that it's not really what we know from these documents; it's what they've unveiled that we don't know. There are discussions in there amongst bureaucrats talking about the impact that the cancelling of this loan will have on Canada-PRC relations. That's challenging, because we shouldn't be looking at that. Civil servants shouldn't be looking at tenders and going, “Okay, well, we should allow this loan to go ahead, or we should allow this contract to go ahead, because it may affect relationships otherwise.” No: We should be trying to get the best ferries and underwriting the best loans.
Finally, here's something for the B.C. audience out there. I believe Mr. Greaves is a B.C. MP. I'm surprised, quite frankly, that he doesn't want to find out more about this. It's in there. It completely redacts the BC Hydro documents and their report completely. This is tens of pages. But do you know what? They forgot to redact some of it. They are saying that having electric ferries will cost B.C. taxpayers half a billion dollars. That's a lot of money. That is a lot of money to upgrade their facilities.
There are lots of unknown things in there. Quite frankly, I would say to my colleagues across the board that this is something that deserves many meetings. I think the Bloc motion is flawed, not because it's including the BC Ferries but because we don't have enough meetings on it. There's a lot more to be told. Just take the hundreds of pages of redactions; do you have no curiosity about what's behind that blackout? I certainly do.
Thank you.