Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm looking forward to this meeting. We have spent much too long debating what we are going to debate as opposed to getting down to the work Canadians sent us here for.
In my region, there's an incredible amount of uncertainty with the second wave. People are looking to us at this time to show that we can make Parliament work and that we can rise above the partisan battles that, in other times, may seem perfectly okay, but right now we have an obligation to the Canadian people.
I've certainly tried to spent a lot of the last few weeks trying to see if we can broker some consensus to move forward. We all recognize that we had started a study on the pandemic spending that had gone awry with the WE project. That began in the summer. With the prorogation, we were unable to finish it, and we need to finish that.
We had a promise from the Prime Minister about a committee to look at pandemic spending issues, and that did not materialize, even though the Prime Minister committed to it, so it falls to our ethics committee to finish off some of these outstanding issues.
I brought forward a motion yesterday, and I was pleased to see the Liberals very supportive of it. The Liberals asked me to change some things in that motion, and I agreed. Why did I agree to change some things that I thought we should be discussing? It's that, if we are going to get where we need to be, we need to be willing to show some compromise here, so we moved off the issue of the judges. There are a lot of questions about whether or not partisan interests are being involved in the hiring of Canadian judges, but we set that aside.
I set aside the issue of Rob Silver, who's married to Katie Telford and was given the contract in terms of the rent review with small business. I think it's a serious issue in the context of the rent crisis we're seeing with small businesses that are still waiting and still calling for us, but I agreed to set that aside for the Liberals because they said that, technically, it had passed a review by the Ethics Commissioner, so we do not need to relitigate it. I have questions about that, but I think, okay, fair enough.
What we have before us now, I think, is a working plan that I'm hoping we can vote on, and then we can get to our witness list. Just to recap, we've agreed to the commitment to finish off the WE study. I don't know how many more witnesses we need. I know the Liberals had a lot of witnesses when the study happened. It's up to them how many witnesses they'd want to bring. I have some areas we need to focus on, because we need to get our report to Parliament so we can close this off. It just looks too strange to not have it finished.
I'm very glad the Liberals, Conservatives and Bloc agreed with my request to look into the issue of Palantir. I am very concerned about this company, this massive data surveillance corporation. I think it has some very dark links in the work it's done in Iraq, its ties to the CIA and the fact that this kind of data mining has raised serious questions about civil rights and privacy rights, which is naturally within our committee's ambit but belongs within the pandemic study because of the role of David MacNaughton, our former ambassador to the U.S. and also the former co-chair of the Trudeau campaign. He was not registered to lobby and has been found guilty of trying to get gigs for Palantir in the middle of the pandemic, all the way up to the Deputy Prime Minister's office. I think that's very concerning.
In a pandemic we need to tell Canadians that, of the massive amounts of money that will need to go out the door to help people through this, this money is always focused squarely on making sure that people get through it and that whoever gets the contracts for these gets them because of merit, and that's it. It's not because of political connections.
That brings us to the other thing the Liberals, Conservatives and Bloc agreed to, which is that we were going to look into the contract of former ethics committee member, Frank Baylis, a man whom I worked with for many years. I have a lot of respect for Frank Baylis, but there are questions about how that contract was awarded.
Those are fair questions to ask. That's not cheap partisan politics. We have to know that the contract was given without political favouritism to reassure Canadians, so we have that agreement.
The Bloc amended the motion with the support that the chair gave them in terms of the documents. My understanding, when I was reading the room last week, was that we were set to get those documents.
Therefore, I don't see any reason to delay any further at this point. I'm encouraging my colleagues to pass this motion, to get this pandemic spending study done. We need to tell Canadians we are watching how the spending is being done. We're looking at it in the Conflict of Interest Act. We're looking at lobbying.
I will certainly not be supporting a continual extension of these hearings. We have an agreement to hold the hearings. I'd like to get down to the witness list. We have other things that we need to work on. Certainly, some of my colleagues have expressed interest in working with me on the facial recognition study. That is important right now. I think we can do good work.
In the last Parliament, I think the ethics committee set a super standard in working across party lines to establish a number of standards for the protections of Canadian citizens. The work of that ethics committee was recognized globally. We were seen globally as leaders on privacy issues.
We have a standard to reach at our committee. That means we're all going to have to rise up, to give up something, and that we have to start getting down to work.
I'm asking my colleagues to move this along. Let's get this to a vote so we can start picking our witness list.
Thank you, Chair.