Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I am just reading how the letters are worded, colleague.
Before I even get back to what happened in committee regarding the testimony of the two ministers, I'd like to digress for a moment to answer the following question. What led us to this motion from Mr. Fortin?
Remember that in testimony before the committee, there was actually an exchange of messages between Ben Chin and WE Charity that took place on LinkedIn. The question that came up was whether or not Mr. Chin had responded to the message that was sent. The thought was that there had to be information and that we needed to dig around, go deeper, explore the issue and make inquiries to find out what had occurred.
I remember very well what I said at the time. Some members had said it as well. I mentioned that we had received 5,000 pages of documents over the summer about what had happened with WE Charity. If we had bothered to look at the documents, we would have seen that there was no correspondence following the message sent through LinkedIn, as I mentioned earlier.
Let's back up a bit. We found that there had been only one message, and no further communication after that. Minister Pablo Rodriguez did tell us that. At the end of the minister's testimony, our colleague Elizabeth May had even concluded by saying that, had she learned this information in the House, the outcome might have been different.
We have an obligation to report the facts as they are and the responsibility to act with transparency. I would be hard pressed to relate facts that did not occur as stated in the motion, because that appearance before the committee took place.
In all honesty, I must tell you that I didn't attend the committee meeting on March 31, but I was present on March 29 and April 8. I did, however, look at the minutes to see what happened on March 31. We had taken a long time to decide whether we would hear the testimony of Minister Pablo Rodriguez. I don't know how much time we spent on that, but we even debated whether we would hear him. We ended up hearing his testimony.
Then the committee came back to the issue of the other two witnesses. This surprised me a little, because in the discussion between committee members and the witness Ben Chin, I was under the impression that Ben Chin was the only one involved.
How did the other two witnesses' names get added to the motion? I still have no idea. I am talking about Amitpal Singh and—
I am sorry, Mr. Chair. I am getting lost in my papers.