Declaration of Emergency Committee on Feb. 27th, 2024

[The Joint Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Shea, on June 13, 2023, our committee passed a motion asking for translation of all the documents.

Faced with a lack of response, on June 26, we addressed a letter to Mr. Hannaford, meaning to the Privy Council Office, reiterating our request.

On September 26, we wrote to you to get an update on the translation schedule.

Finally, on November 14, five months after our committee passed a motion asking for translation of the documents, you wrote to us to say that there were many pages to translate, that it would be very expensive and take a very long time. You then asked us to tell you how you could help us. We therefore responded that we would like an index of the documents. That was on November 21. Today, we still don’t have that index. On December 5, you wrote to advise us that even the production of the index would take time.

Do you continue to claim that you want to help us, Mr. Shea? In two weeks, it will be nine months since we asked for a translation. However, if I understood correctly, you have not even started translating the documents. Do you take this seriously? Are you actually claiming that you’re serious about translating the documents in both official languages and applying the Official Languages Act?

Did you receive instructions from your superiors telling you not to worry about our committee, because you did not have time to translate the documents and we just had to figure it out ourselves? Did someone in your organization say that they did not have the time and they had other things to do? What explains this laxity? It’s been nearly nine months since we asked you to translate the documents, but you have not even started.

Maybe I expected you to tell me that you translated 200,000 pages, for example, but you still needed a year to finish translating all the documents. Far from it; you have not even started the translation. You are unable to present translated documents to us today.

Senator Carignan asked you if someone at the Rouleau Commission recorded the documents presented. You answered that it was probably the case, but that you did not know. As Mr. Carignan said, no one here who worked in the field of justice thinks that it’s even possible for these documents to have gone unrecorded. Personally, I have been a lawyer for 30 years and I have never seen it. Not just in courthouses, but also during private administrative law hearings; it’s automatic. The codes assigned to documents are often discussed before starting.

Commissioner Rouleau is no fool; it’s not his first rodeo. Furthermore, I have a great deal of respect for him. He certainly must have made sure that someone created an index of the exhibits as they were being presented.

I do not understand your organization’s laxity.

My time is almost up, but I would like to know how you explain the fact that, after nine months, nothing was done.

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface]

Mr. Fortin, your time is up.

Perhaps if Mr. Shea can be very—

[The Joint Chair (Mr. Rhéal Éloi Fortin), Bloc, Rhéal Fortin]

We’ve been waiting for nine months, so even if we gave him one more minute—

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface]

I can give him a few extra—

[The Joint Chair, NDP, Matthew Green]

No, no, Madam Chair, it can be in my round. Look, rightfully so, this section is comments and questions. That read as a comment, but I would allow them the opportunity to respond.

There was certainly a lot placed and put to you in the last three minutes. I'll use my time to give you my three minutes to respond to his questions. I think they're important questions. Canadians and Quebeckers deserve to know.

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface]

Thank you, Mr. Green.

Go ahead, Mr. Shea.

[Matthew Shea]

Thank you for the question and thank you for your time.

I think there are two parts to the question: One is what the commission did and one is what we have done in the past nine months or whatever the period has been.

In terms of what the commission did, I'm really not in a position to speak for what Justice Rouleau did. I cannot speak to the independent commission and how it structured itself and how it did its work. I can reiterate that it provided a 2,000-page report in both official languages and that there was public interpretation, but I appreciate that there are other questions that I'm not in a position to answer about what the commission did.

In terms of us, I am deeply committed to finding a solution to this. This is not my first time coming to a parliamentary committee. I am often guided by.... We have a document called “Open and Accountable Government”, which was created under a previous government and has been reiterated by the current government. There's a passage in there talking about confidential information and cabinet confidences, but I think the theme applies, and the theme is really that we should be working with committees to find solutions and provide answers, and not simply say we can't provide information.

My goal, certainly today, and I think in those letters—one of them is from Alex, who is with me—is in a conciliatory way to find a solution. I don't know why there was a delay in that first letter. I apologize. I don't know the exact timing. Since I have been involved, we have sent two letters to try to explain what your request means.

On that first request I'd mentioned, using the math that our colleagues mentioned earlier—one month for 16,000 documents—we're talking years and years and years to be able to provide the entire amount, and so we wanted to make sure the committee understood that and to offer other options. We offered to translate the evidence and said that would take $16 million and this period of time.

One thing I would like to point out is that we have not been sitting doing nothing. We have been working to go through a set of documents—we had no idea what was in there—to try to itemize them a little bit better, and that's why today I can offer to give you a list in very short order.

[The Joint Chair, NDP, Matthew Green]

I do have an intervention. I'm sorry, but I'm going to take my parliamentary privilege to make an intervention on one point, because I want to ask about your scope of authority. What is your scope of authority to accept a $16-million budgetary pressure on your department, given that we haven't come to supplementaries and there's no additional money?

How are you authorized to do that? Could you have been authorized to undertake that work absent some other type of intervention from government?

[Matthew Shea]

That is a very good point, and one that was part of the reason why we wanted to put the dollar value in there. There's no question that PCO would not have the ability to spend $16 million on translation without funding approved by Parliament. There's no question, whatever this committee were to ask for, if it was a large number like that, that we would need to put in a funding request to the Department of Finance and we would need to come to Parliament to seek that funding. We simply don't have the ability to spend that kind of money within a department of our size.

Thank you for that.

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface]

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Green.

We'll move to Senator Harder, to be followed by Senator Carignan.

Senator Harder, you have three minutes.

[Peter Harder]

Thanks very much.

I'd like to follow up on the last train of thought. What is the de minimis funding, incremental funding, that could be proceeded with without having to go to Parliament for an additional fund? In other words, in the time frames that you're suggesting, you're assuming funding is available. What I'm asking is, what are the roadblocks to getting that funding and how much time are you adding for that?

[Matthew Shea]

Thank you for that. I think that would depend on the total amount. If we were talking $16 million, I think my—

[Peter Harder]

Is it $2 million? Is it $3 million?

[Matthew Shea]

I think we could find a couple of million dollars. I think two or three million dollars we'd be able to find, especially where we are in the fiscal year. If that was split over two fiscal years, as an example, a million and a half each year, we could certainly try to find that.

[Peter Harder]

Changing entirely for my remaining time, I'd like to go back to your experience with previous commissions. This is unusual, you say. Can you describe whether there have been official languages complaints with previous commissions, and how they were resolved, or whether there was access to official language requirements that were added on after the commission tabled its report?

How extraordinary is this, in your experience?

[Matthew Shea]

To the best of my recollection, I cannot remember any commission I've been part of that has had a request like this. Certainly I can say definitively for translation, this has never happened, that we've been asked for something that would cost tens of millions of dollars to translate.

I do believe that for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls we did need to update the website after the fact. I believe we added additional translations of indigenous languages, so I know there is some precedent for that, but I do not recall anything that would be on the magnitude of what we're discussing here today.

[Peter Harder]

I will just summarize where we're at.

If we responded to your helpful suggestion and identified documents that this committee, in its collective wisdom, would desire to have, and if that list was modest, in the sense of a couple of million bucks, it could be done quickly and we would be in receipt of that material within weeks.

[Matthew Shea]

It is on the translation piece that I don't want to speak for my colleagues. We could certainly produce the list in a matter of weeks. For the translation piece, we would have to look at it a little bit. It's 152,000 documents with a short title and a little bit of information, but that would still take some time.

[Peter Harder]

Thank you.

[The Joint Chair, Hon. Gwen Boniface]

Senator Carignan.

[Claude Carignan]

I’m coming back to the question asked by my parliamentary colleague, Mr. Fortin.

On June 13, 2023, the committee passed a motion to suspend its proceedings until the documents on the Rouleau Commission’s website were translated. We then sent the motion to ask for the translation.

On June 14, what did you do?

[Matthew Shea]

I do not recall exactly when I became aware of the request. I was not part of this committee work originally.

I do know that in the early fall, a letter was being drafted and sent to this committee responding to that request. I don't want to speculate. I don't know if that's related to Parliament adjourning and the timing.

Absolutely, the internal discussions at PCO were that we would like to find a solution and we would like to adhere to that idea of an open and accountable government where we work with committees to find solutions. Certainly the intention behind that letter and the subsequent letter was to very honestly disclose that this is the work it would involve and open the door for discussions with the committee and the committee clerk to find a solution.

[Claude Carignan]

Regardless, you did nothing during the summer, and we had to follow up with you in October. We were all here, wondering what the Privy Council Office was doing about it and if we would eventually get the translated documents. We are the ones who had to follow up with you, and that’s when we got an answer.

So, over the whole summer, nothing happened.

[Matthew Shea]

I can't speak to what happened over the summer.

I can speak to the fall. The recollection I have of being involved was that we drafted a letter and we sent it to the committee. The committee, I believe, responded, and we responded a second time to try to articulate the costs of various options. We opened the door for translating just the evidence piece, as we understood that was an important piece and it's been raised at this table today. That's where the $16-million figure came from.

At the same time, we wanted to make it clear that the larger ask was over $300 million and many years, and signal to the committee that certainly we would have a funding request that would go with that. That's more than the PCO's entire annual budget.

[Claude Carignan]

At what point did you realize the documentation published on the website was not translated?