Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to rise tonight in adjournment proceedings to revisit a question that I asked on May 29 of this year. To read it now is not only to have déjà vu, and I am certainly not ever going to say “I told you so”, but it is really a rather interesting exchange.
On May 29, I asked what the Government of Canada was thinking. I said that “the Government of Canada apparently just bought a pipeline from Kinder Morgan for $4.5 billion”, which Kinder Morgan had paid $550 million for. However, the main point of my question was that there were 15 different court cases that had not yet been resolved and, “When the Federal Court of Appeal rules, if the court rules that the permits are invalid, what is the government's plan?”
The response by the then Minister of Natural Resources who was quite certain that my question was entirely hypothetical. Looking at the history of what the government had actually done, he said, “We do know that through this process, there was unprecedented consultation with indigenous people.” What we now do know is that the government should have paid a bit more attention to the risks it was taking with public funds for a project that was still before the courts and which had not yet been found to be in possession of valid permits. We now know that those permits were invalid and that the consultation with indigenous peoples violated the Constitution.
The real question for tonight's adjournment proceedings is why on earth the Government of Canada persisted and continued with the purchase of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, the 65-year-old Trans Mountain pipeline, for $4.5 billion. As a result of the court case that I referred in question period in May, all the permits were quashed on August 30. Less less than 24 hours later, on August 31, the Government of Canada proceeded to hand a cheque for $4.5 billion to Kinder Morgan.
Some might think the government had to do that because they had a contract of purchase and sale of the pipeline. I went through that contract of purchase and sale carefully, and there was no closing date in it. There was something called the “outside date” by which if we did not finish the contract and did not provide the money, the whole contract would be null and void. That outside date was December 31, 2018, a date that has not yet arrived.
There was no reason in law, contract law or otherwise, to give Kinder Morgan a cheque for $4.5 billion for a 65-year-old pipeline, the purchase of which did not create a single additional Canadian job, did not bring any wealth to Canada and for which we vastly overpaid. Why did the Government of Canada go ahead and give that cheque on August 31, particularly—and this is significant—that had the government lawyers spent some time reviewing the Federal Court of Appeal case, it would be very clear to them that the court found that not only did the the Government of Canada violate indigenous rights, so too did Kinder Morgan.
As a matter of contract law, with the fundamental breach of all of the conditions that were in place when the Government of Canada recklessly, foolishly, hypocritically, given its commitment to end fossil fuel subsidies, offered up $4.5 billion, why did we not study the Federal Court of Appeal case and get out of the purchase of a 65-year-old pipeline? To this day, especially given the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that we must immediately reduce our emissions, why are we still thinking that we should spend $10 billion more to expand the pipeline?