Declaration of Emergency Committee on Feb. 27th, 2024

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface (Senator, Ontario, ISG)]

I call this meeting to order.

Honourable colleagues, members of Parliament, distinguished witnesses and fellow Canadians who are following this meeting live today, welcome to meeting number 29 of the Special Joint Committee on the Declaration of Emergency, which was established pursuant to the orders of the House of Commons and the Senate on March 2 and 3, 2022.

Today's public meeting is being held in a hybrid format, in accordance with Senate and House of Commons orders.

I would like to point out that a sound test was carried out with member of Parliament Naqvi, who is attending the meeting via video conference. The clerk has confirmed that everything is in working order.

In the event of a technical problem, please let me know so that we can suspend the meeting for a few minutes to allow all members to participate fully.

This evening, we have two panels. In each panel, we will hear from the witnesses and then follow with questions and answers with the members of the joint committee.

I will now introduce our first panel. From the Translation Bureau, I welcome Jean-François Lymburner, chief executive officer; Matthew Ball, vice-president, services to Parliament and interpretation; Annie Plouffe, acting vice-president, policy and corporate services; and Julie Poirier, acting vice-president, linguistic services.

From the Privy Council Office, I welcome Matthew Shea, assistant secretary to the cabinet, ministerial services and corporate affairs; and Alexandra Freeland, acting director general, data and information services directorate.

I'll remind you that you have five minutes for your opening remarks. We'll start with remarks from the Privy Council Office representatives, followed by the Translation Bureau.

Please go ahead.

[Matthew Shea, Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet, Ministerial Services and Corporate Affairs, Privy Council Office]

Good evening, joint chairs and members of the committee.

Thank you for inviting the Privy Council Office, PCO, to discuss the translation of evidence from the Public Order Emergency Commission.

My name is Matthew Shea. I am the assistant secretary to the cabinet for ministerial services and corporate affairs at PCO. As mentioned, I am joined by my colleague Alexandra Freeland, who is in charge of our information management services at PCO.

The Public Order Emergency Commission was established by an order in council on April 25, 2022, to conduct an independent public inquiry in accordance with the Emergencies Act.

PCO is currently the custodian of the commission’s official records, as they existed at the conclusion of the commission’s mandate on March 31, 2023.

We are maintaining the commission’s website for at least one year and are coordinating with Library and Archives Canada to transfer the commission’s records for preservation.

I understand the committee's interest in these records as part of its important role under the Emergencies Act. We are committed to supporting this committee. I am here today to discuss the complexity of the issue and our interest and willingness in finding a solution that would best support this committee's work.

During its operations, the commission communicated with and provided services to the public in both official languages.

The commission produced a final report of more than 2,000 pages, available in both official languages. It summarizes the documents, interviews and evidence that the commission examined during its investigation. The majority of the information created by the commission was disseminated on its website, and it is also available in both official languages.

The commission’s approach was consistent with other commissions' approaches and with that required by federal courts under part III of the Official Languages Act, where evidence can be filed in either official language.

We have provided the committee with two tables summarizing the number of files we received from the commission. However, we recognize that an itemized list of documents may be more helpful to this committee. Since that time, we have created a working copy of the commission's collection for analysis, and have been able to get a more accurate count of the total number of files. We can prepare itemized lists for certain categories of documents, such as the evidence submitted by the Government of Canada, as well as the evidence published on the commission's website, if the committee believes this would be helpful for its important work.

PCO would be happy to continue working with the committee to identify sets of documents that could be submitted for translation in phases.

We are committed to respecting Canada’s official languages and to providing committee members with information to support their work.

Chairs, committee members, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you again today. I look forward to answering your questions, alongside my colleagues from Public Services and Procurement Canada.

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface]

Thank you very much.

We'll now move to Mr. Lymburner.

[Jean-François Lymburner, Chief Executive Officer, Translation Bureau]

Madam Chair, honourable committee members, good evening.

I’d like to acknowledge that we are gathered on the traditional territory of the Algonquin people.

Joining me today are Annie Plouffe, acting vice-president, policy and corporate services; and Matthew Ball, vice-president, services to Parliament and interpretation.

Thank you for inviting us to appear before you today on behalf of the Translation Bureau.

Ever since its creation 90 years ago in 1934, the Translation Bureau has played a key role in upholding the equality of status and the equal rights and privileges accorded to English and French in the Canadian Constitution.

We are the exclusive provider of linguistic services for Parliament. Our translators translate your reports and minutes, and our interpreters make it possible for you to hold your sessions in both official languages. I will take this opportunity to thank Katiana Pocklington, Najet Glenza, Anaïs Haynes, who are interpreting this very important session today.

Since 1995, the federal government, departments and agencies have had the option of doing business with other suppliers for translation. Nevertheless, the bureau still remains their primary supplier of translation, interpretation and terminology services in both official languages, as well as in indigenous, foreign and sign languages.

Of course, our 700 or so translators, about 100 of whom do parliamentary translation, don’t work on their own. In 2023, we outsourced approximately half of our business volume to the private sector. This enables us to translate almost 380 million words, or about 1.4 million pages, every year for Parliament and the government.

We also use technology such as machine translation to increase our capacity, while making sure that the output is revised by a qualified translator to guarantee quality.

Our focus on ensuring both efficiency and quality makes the Translation Bureau a partner of choice, especially for large, complex projects such as the translation of documents for the Rouleau commission.

In that regard, I can confirm, Madam Chair, that the translation bureau provided the Privy Council Office with cost estimates in the fall of 2023. I’d like to give you an idea of the scope of the work involved.

Translating all of the Rouleau inquiry documents, as mentioned in this committee, would take several years of work for the translation bureau. For an estimate, even the last request that we received for the translation of only a portion of the documents involved about 124,000 pages, at an estimated cost of $16 million.

Certain factors related to this project will make the translation process especially complex. For instance, the legal content of some documents would have to be handled by specialized translators. Many of the documents are handwritten or in a format that would require manual operations before we could process them. Part of the documents are classified, which would prevent us from using machine translation or our private sector suppliers. Not to mention that simply managing these millions of pages of documents would require a huge amount of work on its own.

Madam Chair, honourable committee members, I hope you find these explanations helpful. Since you began your work, the translation bureau has been there to support you, just as we supported the Rouleau inquiry. Our legal translators were also there to translate Justice Mosley’s decision. We have the expertise you need, and we’ll continue to be available whenever you require our high-quality linguistic services.

My colleagues and I are now ready to answer your questions.

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface]

Thank you very much.

According to the document adopted on Tuesday, April 5, 2022, we will begin our first round.

They are five-minute rounds, and we begin with Mr. Motz.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you so much to the translation bureau and PCO officials for being here. I really appreciate it. Hearing from you personally is something that we've been working toward for some time.

This is to the PCO. In the correspondence to the committee, I believe you mentioned that there were approximately 265,000 records, representing about 152,000 unique documents that were tabled before the Rouleau commission. The commission posted only about 8,900 of those on their website, which means you guys did that. PCO did that. Is that correct?

[Matthew Shea]

We worked with them. They—

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Okay, that's fair enough.

Can you explain to the Canadian public, which might be asking, why the Rouleau commission had access to 143,000 documents to which Canadians never had access? I understand some of them might be sensitive in nature or as indicated otherwise. Why don't they have access to them today? Can you, as the PCO, determine what status they're at, what exists, what those documents are and why Canadians haven't been able to access them?

[Matthew Shea]

Thank you very much for your question.

Perhaps I'll give a bit of context in terms of our role and the role of the commission.

A commission is completely independent. They run their information management and internal email. We provide support, systems and advice. At the end of a commission, effectively, we're handed those files in electronic and paper form, but there's not necessarily a lot of information about what's in the individual files. To actually know what's in them, we'd have to open them, go through them and make some determinations.

At a high level, what I can tell you is that, within the 152,000 documents you mentioned, there's a mix of four broad categories. There are the documents the Government of Canada provided. That can be a mix of cabinet confidences, top secret information, secret information and protected B information. That's about 31,000 unique files. In addition to that, there are 88,000 files that were productions from other parties. As you know, there were a number of parties with standing who submitted documents. These are the documents submitted by provinces, police services or independent citizens. Those are contained in there. In addition, there are the individual documents created by the commission itself. There are 22,000 files that we have determined were created by the commission itself. Then there are internal documents. Think of HR, finance and those internal administrative documents. It's about 11,000.

In keeping with what's been done in past commissions, there's a website created by the commission with the final report and the information that it deems the public should have access to. Just like any—

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

The commission provided them.

[Matthew Shea]

The commission makes that determination.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Okay, thank you.

I have limited time. I appreciate some of that.

I want to get to something you said in your testimony that I found very helpful.

At our last committee meeting, a couple of weeks ago, we adopted a motion respecting the prioritization of document translation requests. Now, that motion was left somewhat open-ended so we could benefit from your testimony today. I was pleased to hear that you had some suggestions on what you've done already to help us as a committee determine what documents we might need and not need.

Could you explain that a little further for us? You brushed over it. You've created a catalogue of some items that you think would be important for our deliberations today. Can you explain that a bit further for us, please?

[Matthew Shea]

What we tried to create was a bit of a sense of what's in those documents.

I gave you those four large categories. Within those, we can give subcategories of the types of documents. We found that we have this ability, depending on the database used. The government documents are in what's called Ringtail, which is a legal software that we use for many different purposes. It's quite easy for us to determine what's in those documents. We would still have to review some of them before releasing them, for reasons you can appreciate.

In other documents contained in other types of databases, what we can find is a file name and potentially the number of pages. We are finding, generally, that the file name would be “Email to so-and-so” or “Document related to X”. We think that could be helpful to the committee if they were to see information like that.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

You're talking about some sort of index.

[Matthew Shea]

It's an index defined in a certain way.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Okay, that's fair enough.

Are you talking about the 8,000-some documents on the website, or are you talking about a broader range?

[Matthew Shea]

The 8,000 on the website would be evidence submitted in one language or another. We know what that is. We can translate that. We've told you what the cost is.

For the other documents within the 152,000, we believe we could work with the committee to come up with at least a list of what the documents are. And—

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface]

Mr. Shea, I'm going to have to cut you off here. The five minutes are up. I think it will come out in other evidence.

Member of Parliament Naqvi, you have five minutes.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

I want to thank the witnesses here.

To the gentleman from PCO—I'm sorry, but I can't remember your name right now—can you finish your thought? I want to make sure we hear your answer.

[Matthew Shea]

I appreciate the opportunity to finish the thought.

We could give these file names. We believe that in some cases they would be quite helpful in determining what's in the document, and of those 152,000, perhaps there are only 5,000 you may select that are truly of interest. Then we can focus our attention on translating and reviewing those documents, rather than this really large group of documents that, as my colleague mentioned, would take years and large amounts of taxpayer-funded contributions to be able to translate.

Our goal is really to help you narrow down where you would like to focus attention, and then to do everything we can to get that to you in an expedited fashion. It's worth noting that those individual titles are not written in both official languages, so we would have to work with the clerk of the committee to determine if you're comfortable receiving a list that is not translated. Would you like us to translate that list, which would add time?

We are open to whatever this committee would like us to do. We truly do want to find a solution that supports the work of this committee, but in a timely manner and not years from now.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Mr. Shea, to follow up on that suggestion you're making, how long would that process take, in your estimation?

[Matthew Shea]

I think the main question—and I'm not asking for an answer clearly here—would be whether it needs to be translated. If it doesn't need to be translated, we think we could do it relatively quickly—we're talking within weeks. We would want to go through that and do a quick check to make sure there are no titles that have, for example, personal or confidential information that we need to be cognizant of. I think we still have to do a little bit of due diligence, but I think we could do it quickly.

If translation is involved, we would need to work with our colleagues. We're talking about 152,000 lines of information. To extrapolate out, that's probably months, and certainly not weeks, for us to get that translated.

We are completely open to what this committee would like, respecting the fact that you have every right to ask for it translated if that is what you would like.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Good, thank you.

The translation piece is important. I'm really proud of the fact that I belong to a political party for which bilingualism is a very important aspect of who we are as Canadians, so I appreciate what you're saying.

Have you seen a request like this before? Is this quite unique in terms of the work you do from a PCO perspective, and from the translation bureau's point of view?

[Matthew Shea]

Speaking for PCO, I've now supported four commissions of inquiry. I'm supporting the current commission of inquiry into foreign interference. I've never seen a request to get all documents.

As I mentioned, our role is really just providing arm's-length support. We happen to hold on to these documents until they go to the archivists at Library and Archives Canada, so that the public, the media and others can access them after review. It just so happens that we've received this request at a time when we're the holders of the documents. Therefore, it's our responsibility to respond. It is unique in that respect. I cannot recall, certainly in my six years in this role, a request like this. That is why we look at this as unique and we're looking for unique solutions to the issue at hand.

[Yasir Naqvi, Liberal, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Is this unique from the translation bureau's perspective?