Thank you, Chair. Thank you, colleagues.
We are in the second day of discussing a motion that should have moved very smoothly through our first meeting. This is a motion regarding a decision made by this committee last July regarding the obtaining of documents concerning the payments made to the Trudeau family through their work with WE.
Many of the sitting members of this committee were on that last committee and voted for this. We voted for a very clear set of rules around the matter to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. It was based on a duty that we have as parliamentarians to call for evidence when necessary, and it's also recognized that we need to have an agreement to make sure that evidence is protected and that the privacy of individuals is protected.
It was a fairly straightforward motion, yet we've seen nothing but obstruction from the Liberals—an obstruction that began when, on the day we were supposed to receive these documents, the Prime Minister shut Parliament down.
My understanding is that the documents are in the hands of the committee clerk. We have these documents, but we are not able to do our work because of this Liberal obstruction. I think this is very unfortunate.
Why do these documents matter?
The issue is a question of conflict of interest on the part of the Prime Minister, who is under investigation right now, in that the WE group—particularly the Kielburger brothers—had built a close relationship with the Trudeau family that included financial payments. This was highly problematic because, under section 5 of the Conflict of Interest Act, the Prime Minister has the obligation to keep his family business in order so that he does not find himself in a conflict. Everything about this scandal is about that conflict.
Why, then, do these documents matter?
When the Kielburgers were first asked whether Margaret Trudeau and Sacha Trudeau were being paid, they said nobody was paid. We know that many high-profile speakers, such as Jully Black and Theo Fleury, gave their time to WE and were not paid.
It was then shown that what the Kielburgers and the WE group were saying was false. Margaret Trudeau had been paid well over $300,000 and the payments with Justin Trudeau's brother amounted to over half a million dollars. That discrepancy needs to be accounted for.
When we sat at the finance committee we asked the former chair of WE, Michelle Douglas, who had been fired by the Kielburgers, about why the Trudeau family were being paid this amount of money when nobody else was paid. What Michelle Douglas said was extraordinary. She said that the board of directors specifically asked the Kielburger brothers if these payments were being made to the Trudeaus and they were told that no money was being paid.
That was false.
When the Kielburger brothers were asked to explain this discrepancy, they claimed at the finance hearings that Margaret Trudeau and Sacha Trudeau were not paid for public speaking but were paid for the ancillary events afterwards. Those are the corporate sponsorship events.
The question of hiring the Prime Minister's family to work corporate sponsorship events put the Prime Minister in a pretty clear issue of conflict of interest.