Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I greatly appreciate your opening comments.
I move the following motion:
That the Committee send for all information and documents in the possession of the Public Health Agency of Canada or any subsidiary organizations relating to the transfer of Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in March of 2019 and the subsequent revocation of security clearances for, and termination of the employment of, Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng, provided that
(a) these documents shall be deposited with the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel, in an unredacted form, within ten days of the adoption of this order;
(b) the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel redact all information that might reasonably be expected to compromise national security, or reveal details of an ongoing criminal investigation, other than the existence of an investigation, and provide the redacted versions to the Committee;
(c) the committee hold an in-camera meeting with the Law Clerk, within seven days of the conclusion of his redaction of the documents, in order to determine which documents could be made public; and, (d) should the Public Health Agency of Canada not provide documents in their unredacted form within ten days, the President of the Public Health Agency of Canada and the Acting Vice-President of the National Microbiology Laboratory be scheduled to appear for three hours before the committee, within 17 days of this motion passing, to explain why the documents were not provided.
That is the end of the motion, Mr. Chair. I'd like to make a few opening remarks about this motion, and I certainly look forward to the committee's discussion.
Conservative and Bloc members of this committee have sought this emergency meeting out of a powerful sense of the enormous stakes in this matter. Substantively, we have a situation in which deadly viruses were sent from a Canadian lab to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab in China with connections to the Chinese military, which engages in so-called gain-of-function experiments. Gain-of-function experiments are experiments whereby efforts are made to make a virus more deadly or more contagious for research purposes. Concerns about the security protocols of this lab have been previously raised by American officials.
Needless to say, the sending of viruses from a Canadian lab to a Chinese military-affiliated lab that does gain-of-function of experiments raises serious questions for national security and global health, questions that are germane to this committee's current study on national security in the context of the Canada-China relationship.
Shortly after the transmission of these viruses, scientists involved were expelled from the Winnipeg lab for alleged “policy breaches”. That's all we know—policy breaches—but we are still being told that the export of viruses aligned with protocols and we still don't know exactly why the scientists were expelled.
During our last meeting, MPs from all opposition parties sought answers to these questions from Iain Stewart, president of the Public Health Agency of Canada. Questions were asked at both the general and the specific level. For example, my questions did not mention the cases of the specific scientists involved.
I asked the following question: “Mr. Stewart, has there ever been a case where any government lab has fired scientists as a result of security breaches or the improper transfer of viruses?” He refused to answer that question.
I repeated: “Mr. Stewart, this is a critical issue of national security. Has any lab in this country ever fired a scientist as a result of a security breach or the improper transfer of viruses? You're a public servant. People deserve an answer.” Again he refused to answer.
Given the issues at stake, there is obviously a profound public interest in this committee accessing this information, but it is also very clear that this committee has a right to access this information, a right established in law, in our constitutional traditions and in the past practices of Parliament and parliamentary committees. I'll have a bit more to say on that in a moment.
Before going into that specifically, I want to say that what is at stake here is more than just the substantive issues of national security and public health. Through the defiance of Parliament and the defiance of law by a senior public official charged with discharging public functions on our behalf, the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada is asserting an aristocratic as opposed to a democratic principle of government, which is alien to our tradition and our beliefs. He is asserting that public officials, who have heretofore been thought to discharge public functions on behalf of the public, should no longer be accountable to Parliament or at least should be able to control the issues on which they are and are not accountable.
In cases where he deems fit, this official is seeking the right to make decisions, draw conclusions and shift policy responses on his own, entirely insulated from public or parliamentary scrutiny and evaluation. This is simply not how our system is supposed to work. We have a system of responsible government, hard won and maintained only by the vigilance of Canadians and parliamentarians.
The essence of responsible government is that members of the executive and public officials who they appoint are responsible to the democratically elected legislature for the decisions they make. If officials can refuse the production of documents at will, then we have allowed an attack upon a core principle of responsible and democratic government, replacing it with a kind of aristocratic governance in which accountability is circumscribed by public officials.
Mr. Chair, the proper function of an expert or a functionary in a democratic society is to advise decision-makers and to carry out their direction, that is, fearless advice and faithful implementation. Politicians are often wise to trust that advice, but they may also challenge the views of some experts by consulting other experts and, as our system currently operates, not every public servant who is appointed to lead an agency is an expert in the subject matter of the work of that agency.
We have come to recognize the superiority of responsible government over aristocratic government. A government of elites may have expertise on the implementation of certain technical matters. However, a government that is responsible to Parliament, and through Parliament to the people, is necessarily more responsive to the ends identified by the public.
Aristocracies can furnish proposed paths to their desired ends, but democracies define the public interest in a way that accords with the legitimate aspirations of the greatest number. Our system of interplay between the public service and the people's representatives allows us to leverage the technical expertise of a professional policy-proposing class while also ensuring that democratic legislatures ultimately define the ends to which public policy is directed and are empowered to correct and redirect bureaucracies when their proposed objectives do not align with the public interest as defined by the legislature.
The testimony of the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada, by asserting a new aristocratic right not to be accountable to a parliamentary committee, proposes to upset the critical and finely tuned balance that has up until now provided us with peace, order and good government. We should not take this effective challenge to parliamentary supremacy lightly or fail to take a stand in response to it.
Lest there be any doubt as to whether Parliament has these rights, I want to briefly respond directly to the arguments made by the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada that he does not have to provide documents because of the provisions of the Privacy Act.
I believe that he is wrong about the Privacy Act. However, the more important point is that the Constitution of our country, which defines the rights and privileges of Parliament in its pursuit of democratic accountability and the public interest, supersedes the Privacy Act. If a statute were found to conflict with the Charter of Rights, we all understand that that statute cannot operate in that case. The same principle applies in the case of constitutional provisions around the powers of Parliament.
The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs report from the 41st Parliament entitled “Access to Information Requests and Parliamentary Privilege” points out:
Since parliamentary privileges form part of the Constitution, laws must be interpreted and applied in a manner consistent with them, and where there is a conflict between privileges and statutory provisions, the statutory provisions are “of no force and effect” to the extent of the inconsistency. This constitutional principle is a fundamental postulate and organizing principle of the Canadian constitutional structure, and is clearly set out in subsection 52(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982 that provides: “[t]he Constitution of Canada is the supreme law of Canada, and any law that is inconsistent with the provisions of the Constitution is, to the extent of that inconsistency, of no force or effect.
That's a quote from the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs report.
House of Commons Procedure and Practice also notes the following:
No statute or practice diminishes the fullness of that power rooted in House privileges unless there is an explicit legal provision to that effect, or unless the House adopts a specific resolution limiting [its] power. The House has never set a limit on its power to order the production of papers and records.
Mr. Chair, the precedents on this are numerous and well known, and I don't think I need to quote them any further.
Of some importance, as well, is the fact that there is actually not a case of conflict here between the Privacy Act and the constitutional rights of parliamentarians because the Privacy Act specifically envisions a situation like this and defers to us in that case.
My colleague, Mr. Chong, is going to develop this point further with reference to the specific provisions of section 8 of the Privacy Act, which state the following:
...information...may be disclosed...for the purpose of complying with a subpoena or warrant issued or order made by a court, person or body with jurisdiction to compel the production of information or...for any purpose where...the public interest in disclosure clearly outweighs any invasion of privacy....
Mr. Chair and colleagues, we have in front of us an issue that raises questions of national security, public health and the enduring conflict between responsible government and aristocracy. I am proud that members of multiple parties have already taken a clear and principled stand on this issue, and I hope that other members of this committee will as well.
The motion that I have put forward is reasonable and balanced. It provides a responsible mechanism for responsible exercise of this committee's rightful prerogatives. This committee has the right to request all documents, unredacted, right away and for public disclosure. We have a responsibility to exercise our functions in a prudent way that advances the public interest, which is why the motion is drafted. It seeks documents to be sent to the law clerk and then from the law clerk to the committee for its consideration on what to make public and what not to make public [Technical difficulty—Editor].
I believe that this motion is a responsible way of rebuking the illegal pretenses of would-be aristocratic public officials and ensuring that people are held accountable for serious breaches of national security so that we can assure Canadians that these kinds of breaches will never happen again.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.