The reason these documents were requested was that under the Conflict of Interest Act and the definitions of “family” and “relatives”, there's also section 5, whereby the Prime Minister needs to have his affairs in order not to be put in a conflict of interest.
These issues matter, because after Mr. Trudeau became Prime Minister, the WE group began to pay his family members an extraordinary amount of money to do work for them, and they initially denied that. They said money wasn't paid. When we asked the charity board head, the former chair of WE Charity, if she had known that the Trudeau family were being paid, she said they were specifically told that the Trudeau family was not being paid. There's a question of the credibility of the information we've had.
When we asked the Kielburgers to clarify why Trudeau family members were being paid when very famous people like Jully Black and Theo Fleury were not being paid, they told us that they were not being paid to do public speaking but to work the corporate events afterwards.
This situation has put the Prime Minister in a conflict of interest. That's why these documents matter. The question is.... If the documents concur with everything we've been told, then that's fine. If the documents contradict what's been said publicly and under oath at committee, then we have a very serious issue.
I would suggest that the simple solution is that we can vote on it right now. I will come to Ottawa to look at the documents, and then I'll talk to my staff about those documents. I would have preferred to avoid having to come in, because of COVID, and to have my staff go, but I will accept the original terms we had for the limiting of the documents if the Liberals will agree to vote now, before two o'clock, so that we can get these documents put into the clerk's hands and we can begin to work.
If Mr. Barrett will withdraw his amendment, Mrs. Shanahan has said she's—