Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise once again in the House to bring up an issue that is drawing a lot of attention in my riding. I now have many constituents asking me about the Aecon deal.
I see the parliamentary secretary is ready to answer my question. Hopefully, I will get an answer because I know that the deal is supposed to be either confirmed or rejected by the government by the end of May. I hope the parliamentary secretary will be able to illuminate the House on some of the considerations that will go into the decision, or whether he can inform us on whether the government will do the right thing, which would be to reject the Aecon takeover by a China-controlled state-owned company.
We know that experts in the national security field have called into question this entire deal, from top to bottom. One of them said:
It seems to me very difficult for the government to approve the Aecon acquisition without incurring significant risks to national security going forward...It would certainly not be my recommendation to allow it to proceed.
This is a former CSIS director, saying that proceeding with the Aecon deal would not be in the national security interests of Canada. I would tend to agree with him.
In the House, I brought up the China state-owned company's record in Bangladesh, where it was barred from bidding on contracts because the Bangladeshi government deemed it too corrupt to do business with. I brought up the point that it had been banned by the World Bank for an extended period of time for bidding on international projects. I brought up the fact that the same China-controlled state-owned company purchased the John Holland Group in Australia. In Australia, that same John Holland Group is now implicated in a fiasco involving the construction of a children's hospital, with an asbestos-laden roof, lead in the water, and construction defects, amounting to an over $300 million difference between the cost of the project and what is outstanding.
All of these examples point to the fact that the Government of Canada should not proceed with the approval of this takeover of Aecon.
There are also a lot of other issues. The promoters of the project have said that this will inject new capital. That is simply not true. Large-scale construction companies like Aecon, or Graham Construction or PCL do not build public infrastructure just because they can. They typically build it on behalf of governments, such as a school, hospital, or a dam project, with money from that government. These companies are just transitory. It is a transition of cash between the two. There is no injection of new money.
The real concern that national security experts in this field have is that every single one of these large-scale public projects have things like warranties. Companies like Aecon have access to maintenance logs, the entire warranty infrastructure of the particular building or project, so they know how the buildings are maintained, what goes into the buildings, what type of material has been used.
Again, the question I have for the parliamentary secretary is this. Could he tell the House whether the Government of Canada will be taking into consideration every single example I have just mentioned before proceeding with this takeover of Aecon by a China state-owned corporation, and handing over control of one of the largest, most successful Canadian-based construction companies to the Chinese Communist Party?