Who Form 944 Pr Overpayment 2011-2023

A sobering report today from Canada's budget watchdog Eve guru crunched the numbers behind the federal government's 4.5 billion dollar purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, and he found Ottawa may have overpaid for the project by as much as a billion dollars. Not only that, but his report shows the pipeline will lose value if construction doesn't go ahead on schedule. According to the PB o trans Mountain is worth 700 million dollars less after a one-year delay, and if the project is never built, the government's purchase is worth as little as 1.8 billion dollars, which would mean a loss of more than two billion taxpayer dollars. To talk about all of this, I'm joined from the House of Commons FOIA by Joel Lightbound, parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Finance. Matt Janroe is the Conservative infrastructure critic, and Murray Rankin is NDP deputy house leader. Hi to all three of you. Great to see you. Thanks for making time for us. Mr. Lightbound, I'll start with you. I definitely wanna ask you about the question of whether or not the government overpaid for this pipeline, but first, I want to ask you about something Minister Bill Morneau said today. He started saying the cost of the pipeline was 4.1 billion dollars when your government has always said it was 4.5 billion dollars. What changed? Well, basically, when you look at the PBS report, first he said that he estimates the price or the value to be between 3.6 and 4.6 billion. We paid 4.4, but considering the capital gains taxes that Kinder Morgan paid, the net cost to Canadians is 4.1 billion dollars, so it's squarely in the middle of the estimates of the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report. Furthermore, the PBO's report today fails to take...