I will be opposing this amendment as well, because there's a very good reason for asking for the people who are on the list.
I appreciate the fact that the parliamentary secretary has offered up the chief of staff to the Prime Minister, but I think we have a duty as a committee looking into this issue to question the people who have the knowledge of what happened here.
It seems to me that this denying or tampering or interfering with access to information happened in such a way that it could accommodate a minister's deniability. The way this happened over a period of time and across several departments leads me to believe that it's been structured in a way to allow ministerial deniability, and therefore we have to go beyond the ministers.
I guess the other point I would make is that the Prime Minister's spokesman, Dimitri Soudas, kind of alleged that himself when he issued a warning that due diligence and access requests “should be done by public servants, not political staff”.
This is an extremely serious and urgent issue. The only way we can really get to the bottom of it is if we go with the list as established in the original motion.