The Canada Infrastructure Bank: Now the biggest source of corporate welfare in Canadian history.
OTTAWA – The Hon. Andrew Scheer, Conservative Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Communities, issued the following statement following the announcement that the Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB) and ITC Investment Holdings (ITC) have signed an agreement in principle regarding the Lake Erie Connector project:
“Remember when Justin Trudeau gave Loblaws $12 million for fridges? How about the $50 million for Mastercard? Well he has just handed another $655 million of your dollars to another massively profitable private company.
“The deal that was just announced was with ITC Holdings, a subsidiary of Fortis Inc. According to its own website, Fortis had revenues of $8.9 billion in 2020 and paid out over $800 million in dividends to its shareholders. Fortis is a massive energy company that makes huge profits. They do not need a government subsidy to build a project that they were already going to build themselves.
“The Canada Infrastructure Bank was supposed to be Justin Trudeau’s brilliant, new, innovative way to get private money to invest in public projects. The Infrastructure bank was supposed to leverage private sector money to get new public infrastructure built. Instead, it’s using tax dollars to build projects for billionaire private companies, which were already going to get built.
“This is disgusting. Every day we hear from small business owners who are losing their entire life’s work and going broke, and instead this government is giving funds to billion-dollar companies.
“Canada’s Conservatives call on the Liberal government and Minister Catherine McKenna to immediately table all the details of this agreement.”
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For more information:
Office of the Hon. Andrew Scheer, M.P.
Kenzie.Potter@parl.gc.ca 613-301-0917