Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will wrap up quickly.
What I am raising is entirely relevant, and these are not conspiracy theory-driven questions.
Nicholas Wade published questions five days ago in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which is a reputable organization. Ian Bremmer is raising questions about the origins of this virus and the role that the Wuhan Institute of Virology played. Other people are raising questions. This is not in some dark part of the web, driven by conspiracies. These are reputable people raising very real questions.
Our question for us as Canadian parliamentarians is what role the National Microbiology Laboratory had in co-operating with this Institute of Virology in Wuhan. They trained them to a level 4 standard. They sent scientists and viruses over there. We need to know what the co-operation was and why Dr. Qiu and Dr. Cheng were terminated. We need to know what exactly happened in this situation.
Let me finish by saying this. We are a parliamentary democracy, and under two sets of conditions, we have the right to these documents.
As my colleagues previously mentioned, Speaker Milliken's ruling of 2010 was precedent-setting, not just in the Canadian House of Commons but in parliaments throughout the Commonwealth. That ruling made it clear that parliamentary committees in the House have the right to seek papers and other documents from the Government of Canada without restriction, which is exactly what we did in the motion we adopted on March 31, some five weeks ago. These are documents that we have not yet received in unredacted form, as we requested.
Statute law itself says that in respect of personal information, our committee, under paragraph 8(2)(c), has the right to have it, yet we are being stonewalled during a pandemic when the authorities of Parliament and its ability to hold the government accountable are already curtailed.
For all those reasons, I hope that by the end of this committee in half an hour, we will adopt the amendments and the motion that ensure that PHAC provides us with this information, because the Canadian public deserves to know.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.