Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
This morning I wanted to speak to two questions of privilege. I won't be too long, but I think it's important for the committee to consider them.
The first is that last week, when the Kielburger brothers came for their testimony, at the same moment that they launched their testimony they launched an attack website on me, referring to something like 101 lies I've apparently said. I don't lose much sleep over that. I feel like it was very juvenile. I feel like they were trying to stone me in the public square with popcorn.
What concerns me—and I put this to the committee because the issue of our work is serious—is the fact that we had to go a full week where they were actually undermining.... Their lawyers were claiming that parliamentarians shouldn't even be able to draw witness testimony. I've not been aware of attack websites on members of Parliament before. I think it is very concerning. Personally, I've been around a long time. I've got pretty tough shoulders, but I think it could certainly intimidate new MPs, and other groups may consider it.
As part of this first issue of privilege, at the same time that this attack website was launched on me, a Twitter doxing campaign was launched against my daughter. Her photograph was posted online. Her place of work was posted online. People began to target her employer about my daughter. I actually tried to engage with some of them, because they weren't bots. They were real people. I was trying to say, “Why are you making stuff up?” I realized that it was a deliberate disinformation campaign to intimidate me through my daughter over the fact that when she was 13 years old, she volunteered for a Free the Children event. I don't know that my daughter's 13-year-old behaviour in trying to save the world has anything to do with committee.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this. I want the committee to be aware of it because I think it is a pattern of intimidation when people draw our families in, when they try to intimidate us through harassing our family with photos of them and where they work and with other information. I think it is very concerning, and if it happens to me, it could easily happen to any of you. I wanted to put that out there. I'm not sure where I'm going to go with this, if anywhere. Again, I'd have to talk with my daughter, because it's about her personal space that was deliberately invaded because I was asking questions about the Kielburger operation.
I want to go now to my second question of privilege, which I think is definitely within the purview of this committee.
One of the problems we've had with the Kielburger WE study and pandemic spending is that we don't know, after eight months—and I challenge any of my colleagues to tell me if they actually know—how the WE organization works. We don't know anything about their financial structure. We don't know their real estate. We don't know how the donor issues work. We've been trying to get answers. It's about the due diligence that we have to do in order to finalize our report.
I'm pretty close to being ready to finalize this report, but one of those questions was to have Mr. Victor Li testify. We had to issue a legal summons against Mr. Victor Li. Mr. Victor Li said he couldn't come, and he asked us to go the extra mile to write him with the questions and he would answer those questions. Mr. Victor Li has opted not to answer a number of questions.
I think my privilege and the privilege of this committee have been undermined by the trust that we gave Mr. Victor Li, because these are key questions. I'm going to run through just a few of them, and I'm going to ask my colleagues—