Transport Committee on June 8th, 2023

[Bill Morneau]

I'm happy for you to move on to other questions.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Do you want to address the issue of whether the interest rate hikes were the predictable result of current government policy?

[Bill Morneau]

In fact, when I was the minister of finance, I made it my absolute priority not to comment on interest rates. I think I'll continue that this morning.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

What interactions did you have with Mr. Pickersgill in the context of your role as minister of finance, in general?

[Bill Morneau]

I don't believe I have ever in my life had a meeting one-on-one with Mr. Pickersgill. I think he was one of the people supporting Dominic Barton at a certain stage in the advisory council deliberations.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Did he meet with your staff at any point?

[Bill Morneau]

I can't answer that question. I don't know.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Was he the one responsible for selling McKinsey products and services to the Government of Canada?

[Bill Morneau]

I had no exposure at all to any commercial meetings with McKinsey during my entire time in office. My only limited exposure would have been through work with the advisory council, and there was no commercial aspect to that interaction.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

No. However, those interactions brought Mr. Pickersgill into situations where he would have had access to senior officials and political staff.

You're telling us you are disinterested in the question of how he ultimately used those contacts to hawk McKinsey's products and services.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Give a 15-second response, please, Mr. Morneau.

[Bill Morneau]

I had no exposure whatsoever to him or McKinsey in any commercial way, so I have no way of answering that question.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Morneau.

Thank you, Mr. Genuis.

Finally, we have Mr. Badawey.

Mr. Badawey, the floor is yours. You have five minutes.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Good day, Mr. Morneau. It's good to see you again. I want to thank you for your time today.

Mr. Morneau, I'm not going to be consumed by the business of good politics as are those within the opposition. What I'm going to focus on is the business of good government and how the government can support getting infrastructure projects built for Canadians.

I looked at the list of some projects that are under way right now that are attaching to both the private sector and the public sector, to communities, to provinces, to territories, and things of that nature. Within the Infrastructure Bank, both past and existing, and I'm hoping future, with respect to the infrastructure leveraged funding that it's going to provide, I want to ask you to comment on three topics that, again, are of interest to me, my community and I would assume most Canadians.

One, how does leveraged funding accelerate infrastructure projects and add to a disciplined structure for asset management?

Two, how does leveraged funding eliminate the need to defer, to the property taxpayers within communities, water bills, while accelerating infrastructure projects and adhering to a disciplined structure of asset management? That's basically concentrating on the public sector.

Shifting over to the private sector, my third question is this: How does leveraged funding strengthen supply chain resiliency and create jobs, such as the investments in Contrecœur with the port of Montreal project, and in the Algoma retrofit?

[Bill Morneau]

Well, that's a lot. Thank you for the questions.

I think the most important response I can make to that is we absolutely saw that the best way for us to make use of government funding was to put it in places where we could amplify that funding by bringing in other sources of capital. That was what we were trying to do with the Canada Infrastructure Bank.

Obviously by doing that, by bringing in other sources of capital, you have many of the impacts that you just asked about. You have the impact of lowering the likely costs to taxpayers because you've created a way to make it more efficient from a capital standpoint. By lowering the capital costs of projects, that has an impact over time on things like taxes and on other charges that might come to citizens.

You also do, of course, improve people's lives, whether it's through supply chain resiliency, as you say, or improve their lives through, just frankly, better infrastructure. Any of us facing challenges in getting around major cities knows that is critically important.

Finally, as you said, building infrastructure does have an impact on jobs. It often has impacts on jobs in places where there might not be as many other projects to impact jobs, because it can be in places that are fairly inconvenient to get to.

We saw all those as benefits of the focus on infrastructure. Importantly, the Canada Infrastructure Bank we saw as a way to depoliticize it and to bring forth different levels of government together so that we could all work constructively on helping people for the long term. I have to say that it was one of my most important reasons for thinking this was a good idea. It was a way to create long-term prosperity in a political system that too often focuses on the short term. Creating institutions like the Canada Infrastructure Bank, from that perspective, can be seen as a very good decision and a long-term positive for Canadians.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Morneau.

I would get a bit deeper and a bit more granular with respect to the deficits and the challenges we have with infrastructure, especially today with climate change not only within urban communities but also within indigenous communities. There's a huge gap, specifically throughout the north in particular.

Do you feel that the Canada Infrastructure Bank is an effective tool in attempting to narrow or to close the gap both in urban as well as in indigenous communities?

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

I have a point of order, Chair.

Respectfully, I was repeatedly interrupted regarding alleged topicality, and Mr. Badawey's comments could be construed as being on topic, although they don't relate to McKinsey and they don't relate to the origins of the Infrastructure Bank.

I would just ask that the rules be enforced consistently.

It's curious that the Liberal members didn't want to hear my questions or the answers about interest rate hikes or the impact of those on Canadians, but they are very comfortable with this line of questioning, which is equivalent to mine in terms of its relation to the topic.

I hope the rules will be enforced consistently regarding Mr. Badawey's comments as well as mine.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you very much, Mr. Genuis.

Mr. Badawey, with the 40 seconds you have left—

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I will continue with my questioning.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

—would you be able to perhaps make a clearer link?

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Again, sticking to the business of the government versus the politics of government, I will go back to Mr. Morneau.

Mr. Morneau, as I asked regarding the Infrastructure Bank and, of course, the effectiveness of it, does it in fact narrow the gap and close the gap and provide leveraged funding for a lot of funding that we otherwise wouldn't be able to access and/or would have to then defer to the property taxpayer or Canadian taxpayer in general? Does it close that gap within the infrastructure deficits that we see across the country, including in indigenous communities?

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Could we have a 20-second response, please, Mr. Morneau?

[Bill Morneau]

I think the idea behind the Infrastructure Bank was to make sure that we crowded in capital where it would make sense. Of course if you bring in capital on projects that would otherwise have government funding, that allows you to have government funding in other places.

It may or may not have been appropriate for the Infrastructure Bank to be in the places that you're talking about. That's why it was independent to come to those decisions itself together with the private sector. But if it did not, there would still be more funding available, because crowding in private sector investment into other infrastructure projects creates that opportunity.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Morneau.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Schiefke]

Thank you, Mr. Badawey.

Thank you, Mr. Morneau, for your testimony and for appearing for this study.

That concludes this portion of the meeting.

I would ask you now to log off, Mr. Morneau. We wish you a good afternoon.

We are now going from public to in camera for the next part of our meeting. For that, I will suspend for five minutes.

Thanks, everyone.

[Proceedings continue in camera]