Of course, I think it is important that all committee members around this table have access to the same information, so I understand why you interrupted my reading of the letter.
I will start the paragraph from the top:
The context surrounding this motion should give committee members pause. The identical motion has already been tabled in both the Procedure and House Affairs and Finance Committees, and the same motion will soon be tabled in each of the other Standing Committees.
It is not plausible that it was actually drafted by the member who has submitted it for consideration. The only explanation for identical motions in multiple committees submitted by Conservative MPs is that the Prime Minister's Office is coordinating and mandating these actions.
Those are allegations, but, based on many facts, I agree that the current Prime Minister and his cabinet have created what is probably the highest concentration of power in the history of this country. The Prime Minister and his cabinet like having control. They have centralized a great many of the responsibilities that used to belong to ministers' offices or officials.
I personally don't understand that type of political instinct. I come from a culture, a political tradition and even a family that recognize that it is impossible to control everything, to know everything, and that centralized decisions are often founded on very few facts and very narrow views. We all have our weaknesses and our strengths, and we must recognize that knowledge is everywhere.
When I was working as a researcher for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, we started to recognize that knowledge did not come from academics only, from an ivory tower, as they say. I think the Prime Minister and his office have created
an iron tower of secrecy and of control.
The letter points that out, and I think it is a good thing.
Knowledge exists beyond us and our communities. Let's take the Aboriginal people, for example. Through history, most white people all too often assumed that they knew everything and that there was nothing to learn from Aboriginal wisdom. However, I think we have a lot to learn from them. That is just one example. That type of knowledge is not academic knowledge; it comes from communities and people dealing with real-life situations. True leaders must be open to those sources of knowledge and use them to make evidence-based decisions.
I am talking about that because this motion is part of the government's authoritarian vision, which seeks to silence the voices that the government finds marginal. However, there is no such thing as a marginal voice.
At our meeting last week, I talked about St. John the Baptist and the expression “crying in the wilderness” to show how a seemingly marginal voice can leave its mark on our democracy. Think about David and Goliath. David was considered marginal, someone not important who could not contribute much. He was a simple boy who didn't know how to hunt or how to do anything for that matter. Yet that boy changed the world—