Mr. Chairman, as I see it, the minister's offence is twofold. First, she has deliberately misled--I believe she has deliberately misled--Parliament, this committee, and the general public, whether by omission or commission, and one is as serious as the other. There's a point in law that says a person can be presumed to have intended the probable outcome of his or her actions.
You knew the probable outcome of your actions.
Through you, Mr. Chairman, she knew that the world would believe that CIDA cancelled Kairos' funding, not that the politically ideological opinion of the cabinet had found its way into what should be an impartial analysis of an application for funding by an NGO.
The second offence, which is almost as bad, in my view, is that she has kneecapped her senior officials. She has cut the legs out from under the bureaucrats, who are just trying to do their jobs. This is what Ned Franks told this committee about today: we don't have a good mechanism for dealing with this kind of dilemma in Canada. If this were Britain...the secretary of the cabinet has been known to take ministers to task when they lie about the advice they have been given, or otherwise betray the trust and honour of the public service, as he put it.
Unfortunately, there is no such check and balance in our Canadian parliamentary system, in that the Clerk of the Privy Council is actually Deputy Minister to the Prime Minister, so nobody is going to come rushing to the defence of people whose opinions were misrepresented by their minister. That, to me, is as offensive as and of a scale of the contempt she has shown for Parliament by deliberately misleading the House of Commons.
I'll ask her one more time if she will table the examples, the documents. If this is a normal, frequent, and common practice in her department, will she table those documents? I would ask you, Mr. Chair, to ask the minister or direct the minister to do so.
