Thank you, Chair.
I'm also a new member to this committee. I don't have the benefit of having sat through the many meetings of testimony provided, and you've discussed all of these other issues, so I sometimes think this might be a useful perspective, because I'm a fresh set of eyes—although I'm sure some will disagree with me.
Senator, I am one of those people who does not speak French, one of my many regrets in life, so I will need the benefit of translation. I agree with you, sir, that we must do things and conduct ourselves in a bilingual fashion so that resources are available to all. Thank you for pointing that out.
I'm going to address something Mr. Brock said. If I look at the Emergencies Act and what this committee is doing, it's meant to be a contemporaneous review following the invocation of the Emergencies Act, not to review whether or not it was appropriate to invoke it, but to review the exercise of the powers and performance of its duties. Mr. Motz said in his submissions that the report needs to address gaps in the legislation. From what I've seen, read and heard, we're in a position to do that now.
There's a certain amount of irony in my mind when Mr. Brock welcomes Ms. Romanado, me and Senator Smith to the committee. Combine that with the motion when you're bringing in all of these proposed witnesses under all sections of the motion, because it sort of flies in the face of the contemporaneous notion.... Some of these people have retired and some of these people are now ministers—in fact, former members of this committee. If we proceed in the fashion that you are proposing in this motion, I suspect the three of us won't be the last new members who join this committee and have to get up to speed on this.
We have two issues at hand. One of them is the documents and dealing with the bilingual issue and getting them translated. I disagree with the senator's position, again because Ms. Romanado's motion does address that issue. We'll have people from the Privy Council who come in here, and that does not foreclose having other witnesses, but it gets us to a place where we need to be to understand why they are telling us what they are telling us in terms of costs, time and whatnot. I don't think anybody will agree that it's a good idea to spend all of those years waiting for translated documents.
Also, if I look at this motion, it occurred to me as I was looking at it that paragraph B(ii) says, on one of the witnesses they're proposing to call, “members of the Committee shall, within ten days, identify their preliminary lists of unilingual Commission evidence or submissions for priority translation to the Joint Clerks who, in turn, shall relay...”.
If I read that correctly, what's being proposed is that you bring in people who submitted documents in only one language and have those witnesses come here and testify, to what end I'm not quite sure, except that we want to make a decision based on that evidence to then decide which documents we want to translate. That seems a bit like chasing my tail, to be completely candid with you, and doesn't seem to be a productive exercise, because I don't think it will get us any closer to getting those documents translated than where we're at right now. My suggestion would be that we look closely at Ms. Romanado's motion and deal with the two issues at hand.
The other thing about this motion is that Mr. Brock talked about the Mosley decision and Justice Rouleau. I suppose I could sit here and pontificate about who was more senior at the bench and whose career was stronger and whose opinion I will put more weight on personally, but I don't think any of you would want to hear it, and it wouldn't be particularly useful or productive.
That's not our job either: We're not a Court of Appeal. We have a very specific task to do in a very limited time frame, and we're past that time frame. Part of their motion suggests that this report that we're going to deal with be done by June of 2024. It's not possible, because this appeal probably won't even be perfected by June 2024, let alone a decision.
Otherwise, why don't we just all agree? Let's reconvene after these appeals are exhausted, whether it's the Federal Court of Appeal or the Supreme Court of Canada, and then we can review all of the evidence that was put before these.
It's an absurd assertion, I realize, but that's sort of where we are. We have a job to do.
I would suggest we take the information we have. We have the two witnesses proposed by Mrs. Romanado, and we're going to address some components of the Mosley decision.
I don't know whether new evidence will be allowed on the appeal, Mr. Brock. I suppose somebody could argue that, but I don't think it's realistic to expect that there is going to be evidence put before an appeal court that wasn't heart at first instance. There was a suggestion that some of the documentation with respect to the justification for the invocation might appear before the court, so it's going to have exactly the same documentary record and appeal that it did at first instance, so that won't offer any new insight.
My view is that we should move quickly, move to Mrs. Romanado's motion, and deal with the two issues at hand, recognizing the time constraints we have, and the physical constraints we have because of the documents.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.