All right. Thank you, Chair.
I'm happy to show deference in this matter, as in all things, to our good translators. In this matter, I thought that some members might appreciate my moving through the substance of my comments more quickly, but I appreciate the importance of the two official languages.
It's important that our remarks be understood in both languages, so I will slow down a bit.
Thank you, Mr. Schiefke.
Our position overall in the Conservative Party is that we believe it is critically important for this committee to do the work of getting to the bottom of what happened in the context of the prison transfer of Mr. Bernardo, not just because we need to find out what happened in this case but also because we know that there have been previous instances where people have been transferred and families have not been properly informed. There has been significant public concern.
I recall a number of debates associated with specific instances of this in years past. Those debates were very fraught, I think, and understandably so. Conservatives at the time took, I think, very principled positions on those issues, but they don't seem to have actually led to a change by the government. In every one of these cases, we have the government saying, “Whoa, what happened here? Someone should look into this.” That's from the people who are in charge of running our government—or who are supposed to be.
The importance of doing the work we need to do as a committee is to find out what happened in the case of the transfer of Mr. Bernardo—to get to the bottom of it, but also to make sure we don't find ourselves back here in another 12 months or 18 months dealing with another instance like this, where families were not properly informed when a very dangerous, violent person was moved to medium security. Let's do the work now so that we can actually solve the problem, and let's do it in a serious way.
There are some members who find this discussion uncomfortable and find the discussion of the government's record on criminal justice to be embarrassing, but look, after eight years, we need to get to the bottom of why this has repeatedly happened and how we can make sure it doesn't happen again. That is what is motivating us to push, to insist and, yes, to use the rules of this committee to insist on having this discussion in a proper way, to hear the people who need to be heard and to get to the bottom of the matter that took place. It would be unfortunate if we were coming back again and again to this issue without having decisively dealt with it. It would be unfortunate from the perspective of the committee's agenda, but also, much more importantly, from the perspective of the well-being of the public, who are certainly following this issue with great concern.
This is what we are trying to do: to propel the committee towards doing this work, work that requires, in our view, three meetings to substantively get to the bottom of the matter at hand.
Actually, Mr. Chair, I want to propose a subamendment in that context, because I think it would just further align the amendment with some of the language we had previously talked about.
The subamendment I want to propose is to add the words “at least” in front of “three”. The revised text would read, “That the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security hold at least three meetings”, and then it continues as before. I'm hopeful that three meetings would be enough, but for the reasons I was speaking to earlier, the fact is that we can't always control people's schedules and there may be instances where we schedule the three meetings but there's one person we need to hear from who is not available on any of those days.
Out of great deference to our esteemed chair, I think we want to provide the greatest possible flexibility around the scheduling of those meetings. Requiring a minimum of three meetings ensures that the matter will be treated with the seriousness that is required and also that we will be able to have the flexibility around scheduling.
Why is it important to have at least three meetings? Looking at the text of the original motion by Mr. Julian, I counted eight people or entities he wants to hear from. In our view, there is a need to hear from at least a ninth, Mr. Mendicino. In previous versions, we have said there may be other witnesses, in addition to the ones enumerated, that parties or individuals on the committee want to put forward, which can be considered as well.
At a minimum, the eight entities or individuals in Mr. Julian's original motion are the current Minister of Public Safety; the commissioner of Correctional Service Canada; the deputy minister for public safety; the correctional investigator; the federal ombudsperson for victims of crime; Tim Danson; representatives of the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers; and representatives of the Union of Safety and Justice Employees. That does not include, by the way, the possibility that in the process of these discussions there might be other individuals or other victims who wish to come forward. From what I understand, we're not currently aware of those other instances, but we should certainly countenance the possibility that there will be other people, in the course of the discussion, who want to come forward.
We're talking about a minimum of eight individuals or entities. We're proposing a ninth: It makes sense that the minister responsible for the decision, when the decision happened, be invited to appear. It's been noted previously, of course, that the committee can't compel people to appear, so in the worst-case scenario, if the elected officials invited—Mr. Mendicino and the Minister of Public Safety—chose not to appear, I would submit that it would be unfortunate but we would still have seven individuals to schedule in one meeting.
Mr. Julian's additional framing of the motion was to say that it gets to three meetings because we're going to have one meeting in which we're going to hear from all of these witnesses, one meeting in which we're going to hear from Public Safety ostensibly on other matters, and one meeting that is an in camera briefing on trauma-informed questioning at committee.
As my colleague Mr. Motz has said, we see value in the one-hour briefing, but a private briefing intended to inform members of Parliament on these kinds of techniques is not the same as a public hearing. It shouldn't be seen as one of those hearings people are looking for to get to the bottom of the issue. That briefing on trauma-informed questioning will naturally not be exclusive to preparing us for this discussion. It will be, I think, a broader tool for informing the committee about what's on the agenda and what's important to consider in these kinds of cases or situations.
I am just trying to envision the logic of the motion. There is a desire to be able to question the Minister of Public Safety on the broad mandate of the minister. There are so many issues related to public safety that are on the table for public discussion right now in this country—everything from crime to foreign interference and many other issues—so that doesn't obviate the need to have the minister here to address this specific issue. That is actually implied by Mr. Julian's original motion, because it does involve the committee inviting this particular group of people, which includes the minister, for the matter at hand, as well as separately inviting the Minister of Public Safety on other matters.
Our position is that we need to have a serious look at the issue of the prison transfer—not to throw in other meetings as part of that calculation that are actually on other topics, but to have that minimum of three meetings that are actually looking at the issues on the table: the issue of the transfer of dangerous criminals to medium-security prison and the issue of how members of the families, representatives of the families, etc., are notified or included in the conversation.
Our view, respectfully, is that the people who have sent us here would want us to get to the bottom of this issue, which has been a reoccurring issue. If you look back at the debates that have happened in various cases, you will see that it has been a recurring issue. We want to make sure that we get to the bottom of it and that we do it in a serious way, and that requires us to have the number of meetings that are required.
If you have one meeting where you have all of these individuals or groups, let's say eight or nine individuals or groups, first of all you're going to have to get a three-hour meeting. These committee meetings are normally scheduled in two-hour slots, so to say that we're going to have one meeting that's going to be three hours is not necessarily something that the committee can just say is going to happen. The committee may need to engage the House of Commons and the whips and others, depending on the priorities of other committees, in order to get that to happen. It doesn't make sense to say, necessarily, that that's just going to be an easy or automatic thing. It certainly constrains when the meeting could occur. It means that we wouldn't just meet in our regular time slot for the regular amount of time. I think that's fairly obvious. Saying right away that it's going to be one three-hour meeting bumps that back, and it puts at risk the idea that this is actually going to be something that we can get done or get done in a reasonable amount of time.
Then I also just try to envision what that's going to look like in terms of the potential combinations of witnesses. One way to do a three-hour meeting is to divide it up into three one-hour segments so that we have one group of witnesses in the first hour, one in the second hour and one in the third hour. If we have nine witnesses, ostensibly we could say that we're going to have an average of three witnesses for each hour and we're going to proceed in that fashion.
