Mr. Speaker, in September 2025, the Government of Quebec ordered the removal of 1,200 so-called zero-emission buses from Quebec roads. These were school buses, and it was because one had caught fire. The company involved was a local champion called Lion Electric. It was the poster child, if we will, of a government program that the Government of Quebec said it needed a local company for to provide the electric buses to transition its bus fleet from diesel to electric. It was a failed experiment, a rushed transition, but it was something that cost the Government of Quebec over $230 million.
This past spring, the Government of Quebec undid that requirement because of the failed experiment. Nevertheless, if we talk to the people who were actually involved in arranging these vehicles, people like Andrew Jones, they say that the problem with these buses was that an electric bus costs triple what it would be for a diesel equivalent for insurance, costs a whole bunch more in maintenance and is not worth it at the end of the day.
More costs were going to be visited upon society, and not just for the purchase price, which went from $175,000 per vehicle to $230,000 per vehicle just because they cost so much more than the vehicles they were replacing. The government could subsidize the initial part of it, but it did not subsidize anything further. The Government of Quebec lost a significant amount of money, but being the local champion is, of course, the only reason Lion Electric received the contract. The buses had to be bought in Quebec, so 1,200 of those were bought.
After going through more than half a billion dollars of investor funds, Lion Electric entered into CCAA protection last year. This was enough of a failed vehicle electrification experiment that the Government of Quebec scrapped its whole experiment.
This is an indication that it was bad policy, but here is where the Government of Canada was involved in that whole scam. The problem with it is that it is actually a financial crime called a pump and dump. Some promoters in the financial industry got a hold of this flavour of the day and that the Government of Canada was in on the green technology. They got a hold of a marginal production company in Quebec. In the process of raising half a billion dollars on public markets that benefited a whole bunch of insiders, including people who are well-connected with the Liberal government, they cashed in their own shares.
The president of Lion, Marc Bédard, took out $33 million and put it in his pocket before it went bankrupt. This is, like I say, a pump and dump financial arrangement. Investors became very poor in the process and all the management became very rich.
The problem here is with the Government of Canada, because it assisted in this by giving $50 million to this fraud from the strategic innovation fund. It gave $480 million to arrange these vehicles through the Canada Infrastructure Bank. The third leg of that stool is that the Government of Canada gave an unwritten and unquantified guarantee to the lenders to Lion through Export Development.
I have asked, through an Order Paper question, to find out how much Export Development has underwritten lenders like BMO Capital Markets, which provided part of the pump up on this in its reports to get this over the line. This has cost Canadians an enormous amount of money. We need to find out how much it is.
Will the government please indicate how much it has lost on this—