Mr. Speaker, I would say I am pleased to rise to speak to the motion, but I am not. The motion ought never to have graced the floor of the House. It is about separating out an important legislative initiative of the government from an omnibus bill. The Liberals were very clear in the last campaign that they would not use omnibus bills, particularly omnibus budget bills. It is a shame to have to rise to speak to the motion, but it is required. It is also a shame that the Liberals did not keep their promise of not using omnibus bills to advance significant legislative changes.
We have heard from Liberal members all day and previously in the budget debate. In their own view, the infrastructure bank is a new, significant, and different way of delivering infrastructure projects. Whether we think that is positive or negative, the point is that it is new, it is different, and it is significant. There seems to be consensus on that. If that is the case, then it should never have been done as an add-on to the budget bill. It should have been done in separate legislation. That is why it is a shame we have to discuss this today.
I will now speak to the other parts of the motion, which have to do with the virtues of the infrastructure bank, or lack thereof.
I want to focus particularly on the aspect of cost. A lot of work has been done to assess the payback or value to the public of public-private partnerships and the kinds of schemes that are being promoted under the infrastructure bank. This is really P3s on steroids. For supporters of P3s, this is kind of the logical conclusion of the public-private partnership model.
Academics like John Loxley have written about the added cost to taxpayers through P3 models and also the extra costs that we will pay because of the infrastructure bank scheme. The Auditor General of Ontario determined that P3s cost taxpayers an additional $8 billion. The Auditor General of British Columbia estimated the government lost $81 million in additional interest on P3s. It paid 7.5% instead of what its own lending rate was.
I would like to put this in context. It might help to get a sense of the magnitude of the rip-off we are about to embark on with the Liberal government.
If someone were looking to renovate his or her kitchen, a job that would cost about $30,000, was going to borrow $22,500 to do it, putting $7,500 down and borrowing the other 75%, at 2% interest over 20 years, the cost over the life of that loan would be $27,296. The specific numbers are not that important; it is really the orders of magnitude. The person would pay a little over $27,000 to borrow that $22,500.
Let us say a contractor knocks on the person's door and says he has a deal for the homeowner. Knowing the homeowner only has $7,500, the contractor will give the individual the other $22,500 required. The conditions are that the contractor will own the kitchen and a turnstile will be installed. Every time the homeowner goes into the kitchen, a toll will be paid and the contractor will get a 10% return, cumulative over years. If we pop that into the loan calculator, it means that over the life of project, instead of paying $27,000, more or less, the homeowner will $51,000 to the contractor. How will the homeowner pay it? It will not be paid through what we call a mortgage payment, but through the tolls paid every time the homeowner goes through the turnstile in the kitchen.
If the homeowner goes into the kitchen three times a day to get a snack, the cost will be $2.35, which adds up to $7.05 a day to go into the kitchen to prepare food. If we take that as the fixed cost for the homeowner to go into the kitchen, which the person should own, to eat food, it means the amount owed, if the homeowner had borrowed the money at 2%, will be paid in 10.6 years. Instead, the homeowner will pay the same toll every day for 20 years. For people at home, I hope that helps put this in perspective, that this is the biggest corporate heist of the century that the Liberals are engineering. This is about using taxpayer money to line the pockets of private investors, not even Canadian private investors, from Saudi Arabia, China, and all over the world.
That is the magnitude of what we are talking about with respect to the rip-off. When people at home hear that, I think they might think I must be wrong because it is outrageous, who would ever go for that deal, that is a stupid deal, that my math must be wrong. However, that is not so, and I wish I were wrong about that.
We have heard from other authorities that this model risks doubling or tripling the costs of the project. That lines up exactly with these numbers. It is a bad deal, and one wonders why the Liberals are willing to contemplate it. I do not know. I can make some guesses, but even the most charitable guesses are not that favourable.
If we leave aside some reasonable guesses that the evidence suggests with respect to cash for access fundraisers and a cozy relationship between the members of the Liberal leadership and Canada's corporate tycoons and look at what the benefit would be if those guys were not their friends, they could start more infrastructure projects now, and we have heard Liberal members talk about that today, and keep the real costs of those projects off the books so it looks like they are balancing the budget when they are not balancing it. That is all well and good if it is a game of fun with numbers and an exercise in how to make their political party look good.
Canadians want investments in infrastructure. That is one of the reasons they voted for the Liberals. I do not think they are getting what they asked for. However, it is fair to say that it was one of the reasons people felt compelled to vote for the Liberal Party. The enthusiasm and the support is there for investments in infrastructure. However, Canadians did not say that the Liberals should invest in infrastructure but not be honest with them about the costs. They did not say that they should invest in it and pretend that we would not pay as much as we really are for those investments. In fact, they said that they were willing to pay and were even willing to run a bit of a deficit to do that. That is not what they are getting here. They did not ask to be fooled about the real costs of those investments and they did not ask to pay a premium to be fooled. That is what is going on here.
The Liberals will artificially inflate the costs of these projects potentially to the tune of two or three times in some cases. Maybe it is not that much. We would know better if we knew what the rules of this game were, except we do not. We will not have time to study it. Instead of putting it in its own bill and giving it its proper due, not just with respect to debate in the House but study at committee, and time for civil society, economists, academics, and everyone else to study the bill as it goes through the House, they will ram it through in an omnibus budget bill. Maybe if we had the time it would not be so bad, I do not know.
However, the numbers so far, and in some of the expert opinion so far, suggest that we are talking about a doubling of some of the costs. What is the reason? To allow the Liberals to hide the real costs of these projects from Canadians because they want to make their books look better. Better books is a good thing. It is always better when the revenue is closer to what the costs are. However, for them to have better books because they are dealing with another ledger, not recording some of the substantial costs, and causing Canadians to pay more money over the long term is not better. That is political smoke and mirrors.
To ask Canadians to pay billions of dollars more to line the pockets of corporate CEOs just for the sake of the Liberals having better speaking notes is an offence. It is an offence to the intelligence of Canadians and an offence to their wallets. I do not know if the Liberals have been out talking to people, but they ought to know that the wallets of Canadians are not particularly padded these days. These are difficult times. Therefore, to inflate the costs of these projects, maybe for the sake of their buddies or for better speaking points, is completely wrong-headed.
I have not even had time to get into the problems of what the Liberals did when they were setting it up, and Canadians have real cause to worry. People in Winnipeg saw what happened when people in the public sector hired out people in the private sector on the P3 model and did not take the time to do the proper due diligence and provide the right kind of scrutiny for those deals. It is clear that we end up with a bunch of wasteful spending and projects costs escalate far beyond what they are supposed to be in the first place.
If there is any lesson we have learned in Winnipeg, and I would like to share that with the country, it is that if we are going to partner with private people to do infrastructure, and I am really not convinced that it is a good idea, and the evidence says it is not, then we definitely need to spend the time to have the appropriate scrutiny and oversight to make sure that taxpayers are not being ripped off. It is the exact opposite of what the Liberals are doing by ramming the bill through in an omnibus budget bill. It is why we need to carve it off so we can take the proper amount of time to study it.