Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise here today to contribute to a very important debate about taxpayers' money and where this country is going.
One of the interesting things about the budget allocation process is the government's move to move toward public-private partnerships with respect to infrastructure, something that it did not campaign on in the past election but that is driving its actions right now because of the fire sale required to pay for some of its promises and its budgetary practices that are way out of hand. In fact, we have gone from a promised $10-billion deficit to a deficit of upwards of $40 billion. I would suggest that by the end, it will be higher than that.
Here is a situation that is interesting. On Monday, the Prime Minister and his assembled cabinet spent an afternoon at the Ritz-Carlton in Toronto to basically showcase and sell off parts of Canada, especially infrastructure, to the private sector. The private sector on that day included not only private equity firms whose investors we do not know, but also non-democratic countries who have their own infrastructure banks and monetary allotments to buy Canadian companies.
I remember one of my first notations in the House of Commons was when China Minmetals was wanting to buy Canadian natural resources and the Investment Canada Act had no national security screen on that. I worked hard to get an amendment to have such a screen as part of the Investment Canada Act because, at that time, we had a non-democratic Communist government that was using its financial resources to purchase Canadian natural resources. The ironic thing is that at that time, it was the Paul Martin administration that was selling Petro-Canada. So it was okay for the Communist government of China to purchase gas assets and resources and companies in Canada, but it was not good for Canadians to own a stake in their own company and their own natural resources, which they had already invested in in the past and were being dividends.
In fact, when we look at the books, we will find out, because we had a fire sale on, that the government lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the months after that because prices spiked after it had its fire sale. It was an interesting thing that took place and now, to this date, we have less.
When we look at the economics of this, we are looking at P3s being done in a country like Canada, which has one of the lower debt levels and some quite significant infrastructure assets. We are showcasing the strength of our capacity in that regard. We also have some of the lowest borrowing rates out there, which is important to note because those lower rates create these opportunities. Yet, the government still wants to go outside our country to bring in resources from other countries and from other private equity firms for them to make a profit over what Canadians have already paid for.
It is bizarre. When we think about the future for our children, we are sandbagging them, just like we did on the Highway 401 system that allowed these companies to get their assets and then pay for their profits at the expense of our children in the future.
I know I have to conclude, but it is a bizarre way of passing on a legacy to our kids that is supposed to about economic and fiscal responsibility.