Canada-China Relations Committee on June 7th, 2021

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount, QC]

Yes. We're at 63 now. It was 58 when I made the announcement in February.

Of course, every time I speak to another country, I bring up the importance of it, because it could happen to them. We're building that. We are in fact moving towards the next stage with respect to the arbitrary detention declaration.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

I've often thought that it's a two-way message. It's to countries that might perpetrate arbitrary detention. It's also a statement to our own citizens to say that we will absolutely have their back, as you have for the citizens arbitrarily detained.

The situation in Hong Kong obviously takes a whole-of-government approach as we're looking at it. This is an issue that I think every member of this committee, no matter what party they're from, is concerned about—

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Thank you, Mr. Oliphant. I regret that we won't have time for the answer to the question you were about to ask. We'll have to conclude with that.

Minister, thank you very much for joining us this evening. I'm glad, first of all, that the power in your phone and your notebook computer held out until your electricity came back on. It's good to see that happen.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, the power came on and I'm even feeling some cooler air.

If I may say so, you run a very tight ship. You must be a Nova Scotian, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

That's a good comment. You can come back and see us again someday.

Thank you, Minister Garneau.

We will go on now to the second hour. We have the officials.

We have Mr. Genuis for six minutes, please.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to use this time now to move the motion that I had provided notice of. That motion has been distributed to all committee members. The motion is the following:

That, in relation to the documents ordered by the Committee, on Monday, March 31, 2021, and Monday, May 10, 2021, to be produced by the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Committee publish on its website all the documents received from the Agency in their current redacted form, while underlining its insistence that the Public Health Agency fully comply with the orders for the production of unredacted documents.

Mr. Chair, this motion reflects the fact that, unfortunately, we have not received the unredacted documents. However, we have been given redacted documents. We've been asked by journalists to share those documents. There's a public interest in this information being made public. I think we have an obligation to do that.

We've received these documents. We've had plenty of time to review them. I think members will agree with me that there's nothing in these documents that can't be made public. The Public Health Agency of Canada—inappropriately, in my view, but it was still done—redacted information that they didn't want made public.

Given that these redactions shouldn't have taken place but did, we have no reason at this point not to make the redacted versions of the documents public. I think we have an obligation to do that.

I put forward this motion. I hope it can be dealt with quickly and that we can return to questions. I wanted to make sure that we got this done; hence, I moved the motion.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Thank you, Mr. Genuis.

I have to open the floor and see if there's any debate. I'll look for hands.

Go ahead, Mr. Oliphant.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Thank you.

I'm not opposed to the motion, but I also want to walk through it and think about it a bit with the committee and get the wisdom from members of the committee to understand what the value is of doing this in terms of a public good.

I have supported this kind of motion at other committees, but I wonder what the value is and why we should entertain this motion at this point when we still have a set of activities going on. We have a motion that has been passed by our committee with respect to the submission of documents to our committee. That motion then got somewhat doubled up and superseded by an opposition motion in the House, which was confusing for me as well, because it seemed that we didn't allow our committee work to continue while the House had another order at the request of the Conservatives. Now we're getting something that is again leapfrogging over a process that I don't think is finished yet.

I am looking for wisdom from members of the committee to find out how it is that we are adding to the public dialogue and discourse on this topic, what it is that we want to accomplish, and how it is perhaps going to be, if not necessarily in conflict with, but out of order with the number of steps that the House has asked to take place. I don't think we've resolved either the committee motions from May—when we made two motions that dovetailed, one into the other—or the House motion, and now we have this motion.

As I said, I'm not on principle opposed to this motion, but I also want to make sure that we're doing things in an order that is discernible in terms of our motivations.

I found it interesting when I read an interview with former member of Parliament Derek Lee, who has this as his fascination and his interest. He has written a book on the issues of parliamentary privilege. He talked very guardedly in that interview about wanting to make sure that all the things we do as a committee are for the work of the committee and the public good and are not simply motivated by partisan political activity.

I just want to dig into this a bit. I'm a little disappointed that it's happening when we have witnesses, who are taking time from their schedule to be with us this evening—and on my birthday, even, I would say.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Oh. Well, happy birthday.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

I like to respect witnesses and their time. These are public servants who are working for us and Canadians every day. However, I also think that we have some digging in to do on this particular motion, so I would like to hear from colleagues about it before we move on it too quickly.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Happy birthday, Mr. Oliphant, and thank you.

Mr. Harris is next.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you, Chair.

I'm happy to join in wishing Mr. Oliphant a happy birthday. I'm sure he would probably be celebrating it some other way than joining us this evening.

[Rob Oliphant, Liberal, Don Valley West, ON]

Mr. Harris, let me interrupt for a moment. I can't think of a better group of people to be spending this birthday with, virtually.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Well, I'm glad to hear that.

I have some sympathy for what Mr. Oliphant is saying, in that we are in the process of undertaking a study on what happened through PHAC at the lab in Winnipeg and we need these documents and this information to be able to do our work. I wanted to congratulate the enthusiasm of Mr. Genuis and others on the committee in pursuing that information. We all joined in that pursuit and in the motion before the House.

I'm a little bit concerned that it would be difficult for the public to follow what we're doing if we're calling for these papers, as in the title of Derek Lee's book, and we're not getting them. Then I guess the pursuit is to follow through on that in the House of Commons.

I wasn't there—I was busy at another committee doing a report—but I gather the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel has actually written to them since the question was raised by you, Mr. Genuis, in the House this afternoon, saying that we did not get the unredacted papers, and there's now a motion of privilege before the House. All of this seems to be perhaps piling on one procedure after another.

As to the release of these documents in a redacted form while we're asking for the unredacted ones, I'm wondering whether there is a value in that right now. Will it stop us from pursuing our work, or is it just giving other people an opportunity to comment on them while we're trying to pursue the other documents?

I'd like a little clarification on that, because I think the narrative to the public may just be confusion about various parliamentary procedures going on, as opposed to the substance of what is being sought by the committee with respect to these documents and papers. I wonder if you could explain that a little better.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Thank you, Mr. Harris.

Oh, I thought I had Mr. Lightbound, but now I have Mr. Genuis instead.

We have Mr. Genuis, please.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Very briefly, there are two separate issues. One issue is the continuing expectation that unredacted documents will be provided. That's one.

The other issue is that we already have some documents and we are operating in a democracy that is open by default. There's nothing secret in these documents. Let's make those public. While this process is going on over here with the unredacted documents, let's make the redacted documents public, because the public are interested. We've had journalists contact this committee. The public have a right to know. There's no reason to keep them secret.

Recognizing that there are two processes going on, let's just make public the documents we can make public. That's all this does.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Mr. Lightbound is next.

[Joël Lightbound, Liberal, Louis-Hébert, QC]

Just like Mr. Harris and Mr. Oliphant, I am relatively well disposed toward this motion, but the elements raised by Mr. Harris, among others, are worthy of consideration and should be discussed in more depth in committee.

Could we talk about this after the witnesses leave, when we discuss committee business? This is my humble and respectful suggestion, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Thank you very much, Mr. Lightbound.

No committee members seem to want talk about it right now. I cannot decide when we could discuss such a topic. If no one wants to debate it, I will ask the clerk to go ahead with the vote.

Oh, we have Mr. Harris, please.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

I'm certainly prepared to support this motion. The explanation makes sense. The only part that didn't make sense was the assertion of openness by default coming from someone who was active in the Harper government. I don't think we saw very much of that during the years that I was here when Mr. Harper was prime minister. Be that as it may, perhaps this is a new era of conservatism that we haven't experienced before.

Your explanation is a simple one. If we have these documents and they are redacted to the satisfaction of PHAC and don't contain anything that they wouldn't give to someone asking for an ATIP request, such as has happened in other committees, then making them public is not going to do any harm.

Mr. Oliphant was concerned that we might be causing confusion with three or four different things going on at once.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Thank you, Mr. Harris.

I'm not seeing anyone else wishing to debate—

Monsieur Dubourg, go ahead.

[Emmanuel Dubourg, Liberal, Bourassa, QC]

Mr. Chair, I would like to get a clarification. Could my colleague Joël Lightbound's proposal be taken into consideration?

Given the time, he is right to say that it would be good to be able to discuss or debate the topic, instead of going to a vote right away. It would be worthwhile to take his proposal into account. I am wondering whether my colleagues agree with me. That way, we could have more time to discuss it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

As chair of the committee, I do not get to decide. The committee does. Members always have the opportunity to propose motions, but the committee members don't seem to want to debate the issue right now. Since that is the case, I must ask the clerk to proceed with the vote.

(Motion agreed to: yeas 11; nays 0)

Thank you very much.

Now, to my understanding—Mr. Genuis may be aware of this—when a member uses their time to propose a motion and of course then speaks to their motion, they unfortunately give up the rest of their time.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Outrageous.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Well, I see that you're smiling. I suspect that you might have been aware of this.

I'll go on to Ms. Zann for five minutes, please.