Well, I'm glad that we have Mr. MacKinnon joining our show already in progress. Welcome to the committee, Mr. MacKinnon.
Yes, you may not have had the opportunity to hear all of the outrageous claims that were made by your colleagues on why the WE organization was selected to deliver a program that it couldn't possibly deliver on, which was why the government had to sub out French language services if it were to deliver the CSSG in Quebec. We have a real pattern here. The Liberals say, “Yes, we have this great service provider, but they can only do half the job. They can't serve French language constituents, so we're going to pay somebody else to deliver on that service as well.”
Ms. Shanahan also talked about the committee's ability to handle this matter. The Standing Orders are very clear in subparagraph 108(3)(h)(vii):
the proposing, promoting, monitoring and assessing of initiatives which relate to access to information and privacy across all sectors of Canadian society and to ethical standards relating to public office holders;
Therefore, this study is quite clearly within the mandate of our committee. I'm sure they'd like to talk about lots of other things, such as what Conservatives do, so if we're going to talk about what we do in our offices, I'm glad that we brought it up. I'm happy to tell the members of the committee that in my office we use a program called CivicTrack. We don't use any other software.
I'd be very interested to hear about their data management practices. You've heard mine. You can see that disclosure and you can talk to my staff. In fact, some are here. If we wanted to get this under way today, I'd be happy to have my staff talk to the committee about how we exercise our function and how we are appropriately stewarding taxpayer dollars.
I have a lot of questions about what's happening on the other side of the table. That's why it's so important that we hear from Mr. Pitfield. This amendment that we have from the Liberals is a red herring. They want us to chase this amendment and run out the clock.
We're here to deal with something. We can deal with it very quickly. I would be very happy to support an amendment to the main motion that, as Mr. Boulerice suggested, would see us meet for two hours. Once we've dispensed with this, I'd be pleased to deal with that idea. If the intention is that members want to add all of the parties' data management software and all the independent service providers they use and give the Board of Internal Economy lots of work to do over the summer, I guess it would be up to BOIE if it wanted to take up the task, but let's talk about what this committee can do. This committee, today, can decide to deal with this issue.
I think it's very serious when we have a potential conflict of interest and we have a minister of the Crown directing other members on how to spend their office budgets. Those members have no idea how it works. Let's not fall for any parlour tricks today. Let's instead focus on what we're here to discuss, and that's taxpayer dollars being spent on a contract that's very problematic for the Liberals. Let's deal with that.
Once we've dealt with the amendment that's on the floor, Mr. Chair, I'd be pleased to move an amendment to the motion in support of Mr. Boulerice's suggestion that we deal with this issue expeditiously, potentially even concluding it this week.