Madam Speaker, my remarks tonight follow up on my question to the Prime Minister on December 8, 1994, about the contract awarded to Saint John Shipbuilding without a call for tenders; the MIL Davie Shipyard, which had submitted a bid, was wronged in the process. Here is the question I asked:
How can the Prime Minister explain that, despite the clear directive issued by him to the president of the consortium, Mr. Ken Hall, Hibernia has refused to redress the injustice to which he has himself so strongly objected?
The Prime Minister answered:
I think the company should not have acted in this way. I have said it clearly, but since we own only 8.5 per cent of the company's shares, we cannot force it to change its decision. I still think it is a bad decision for both the Newfoundland shipyard and the Quebec shipyard.
The answer given by the Prime Minister is not complete. In my opinion, it is not true that the federal government is not in a position to force its views on the Hibernia project. It is true that the federal government owns 8.5 per cent of the shares in the Hibernia project for $340 million, but the Prime Minister forgot to tell us that the government invested $400 million more in 1992, when Gulf pulled out. The federal government also pays almost $100 million in cost overruns. It granted $1 billion in subsidies and gave $1.7 billion in loan guarantees. More over, it undertook to pay the difference in production costs between the market price and $25 a barrel.
Let them not pretend the federal government is just any other investor. It is the main investor in the project with $3 billion out of $6 billion. The Prime Minister should have taken a tougher stand and demanded that the consortium follow his directive. Hibernia is the perfect image of Canadian federalism with the lobbyists making the decisions and the Prime Minister carrying them out. As a result, we have policies which lead to waste and a debt of $500 billion, megaprojects which are ruining us and will never be profitable.
Of the five modules ordered for the amount of $100 million, two were made in Korea, two in Italy and one in Newfoundland, following construction of a shipyard 25 per cent of which was paid for out of our tax money. We were told that the study recently claimed that MIL Davie was not profitable, but who produced this study? It was Ernst & Young, which contributed $116,452 to the Conservative and Liberal Parties in the last election and received federal contracts worth $2.4 million in 1993-94. Can Quebecers trust such a partisan study? What I would like to know is if the Prime Minister will make a commitment to ask the consortium to grant the contracts for the construction of future tankers to MIL Davie as was done for Saint John Shipbuilding, that is without a call for tenders?