Madam Speaker, before the government announced this sweetheart deal with Maritime Launch Services, the stock for this company was trading at around four cents a share. Following this government announcement, it went up to 60¢, and today it is at about 46¢. What that tells me is that this was an extremely risky proposition the company was putting forward, and the market did not ascribe a lot of value to it.
How can the government be so confident that it knows better than the free market how to allocate scarce financial resources, when a company that is essentially a penny stock is getting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding? The current government does not have a good record of investing money in the private sector. How can the member be confident this penny stock is going to get a return for Canadian taxpayers?