A report from the Parliamentary Budget Office says the Trudeau government may have significantly overpaid for the Trans Mountain Pipeline.

The PBO report says the feds may have overpaid by nearly $1 billion when they bought the pipeline for $4.4 billion last summer. The report says its value was between $3.6 and $4.6 billion.

Conservative MP for the Nicola-Similkameen-Central Okanagan Dan Albas was critical of the Liberals’ spending.

“I see this as yet another failure in Mr. Trudeau’s handling of the Canadian resource sector. I’m personally on the record as suggesting that the only reason why Mr. Trudeau bought this pipeline to begin with was to control the political timing of it. In essence, he’s used Canadians’ hard-earned tax dollars to pay for a problem of his own making.”

The PBO report also points out the construction cost for the pipeline expansion is currently pegged at $9.3 billion, and it says every extra year work is delayed will decrease the pipeline’s value by about $693 million.

Albas says people in his riding generally just want it built already.

“My constituents in Merritt, almost every one I’ve spoken to – even some provincial NDP members – are in favour of that pipeline, because they know it’s through the resource development how people put food on the table in many of these areas.”