Thank you very much for that intervention, Mr. Chair. I really appreciate it.
Chair, your response to the concerns that I raised yesterday was accurate—to a point. With respect, it didn't respond to the actual point of the question. You explained how committees have significant power to request documents from government, from organizations and from Canadians, and I absolutely accept that. That is the power of Parliament. The question is not whether we have this significant power. The question is what our responsibility with that power is.
If every time the Conservatives want to go on a fishing expedition, we're going to start issuing massive orders to organizations to turn over employee information, that is something that I want no part of and I do not want this committee to set that precedent whatsoever. I don't think it is the right approach to how we conduct ourselves and how we represent Canadians here.
Who are we going to be implicating in all of this? Is it the administrative assistant who organized the email four years ago? Is it the 21-year-old summer intern who helped out by answering phone calls?
This is not a responsible way of going about this. If we were to let the Ethics Commissioner look into this matter, that might be the more responsible approach. When his office conducts a review, he does so privately and for good reason—all of those reasons that I just outlined. If he's going to take a look at the employees of this company, they can be assured that their privacy will be respected, as it should. Our laws in this land make sure that privacy is respected.
The Ethics Commissioner has already told us that he needs to decide whether an investigation is warranted, so why not just let him do that?
The reality is that the Conservatives aren't interested in the opinions of an independent officer of Parliament. They're interested in turning this committee into a partisan circus, and they have no regard whatsoever for the innocent individuals they drag into this. That is absolutely unfair to Canadians.
I have to ask what the Conservatives' real goal is here.
On one hand, they're saying that all they really want is the surname of this individual. On the other hand, they're calling all kinds of additional witnesses and requesting all kinds of additional names. Mr. Barrett seemed to acknowledge, in his remarks yesterday, the incredible overstep of dragging regular Canadians before this committee. They suggest that they are concerned about who this other Randy is.
If that's the focus, why do we need these long hearings? Why do we need Ms. Poon? She isn't mentioned in these text messages. We don't need the names of the intern or the person who emails the office. We don't need the names of any additional people named Randy who may have worked for this company in the past, the present or the future.
Who we need, however, is Mr. Anderson as to who Mr. Anderson spoke to on that day. Perhaps the solution is this. We simply request that Mr. Anderson turn over his phone records and text messages for September 8, 2022. The minister has shown his phone records. We can ask Mr. Anderson to do the same. This will show whether or not he texted or called the minister on that day.
We have seen from the minister's records that there is no such phone call, so why not check both?
I think that it would be a very reasonable way to continue to protect the privacy of Canadians and to make sure that we are doing our work here in this committee. Should we receive that information and it shows no communication with the minister, there would be no need to drag these witnesses before the committee to face abuse.
I've seen witnesses face abuse in this committee, Mr. Chair. We would have our answer about whether or not the minister was called or texted.
I have a rather bad feeling that the Conservatives want more than the facts. They want angry social media clips. They want to tar and feather these witnesses in public view and then send a fundraising email bragging about it. That's the method of operation. I've been a victim of this too.
Let's see if that's right, Mr. Chair. Let's see if they're interested in evidence or if they're interested in politics. I suspect that the Conservatives aren't interested in the actual evidence because they are disregarding the real evidence that we have. It comes from Minister Boissonnault's phone records from September 8 of 2022. We can see very clearly on those phone records that there are no calls between 11.12 a.m., Pacific time, and 5.37 p.m., Pacific time.
That covers entirely the time frame that Global News talks about in its coverage and the time frame that Mr. Cooper talked about at length during the minister's appearance. Under that time frame, everyone involved was supposed to be on a “partner call” at 12.30 Pacific time. Clearly, from this phone record, Minister Boissonnault was on no such call. An examination of Mr. Anderson's phone records would, I think from this, show no call from the minister either.
Let's also remember that on September 8, 2022, Minister Boissonnault was in Vancouver attending a cabinet retreat with wall-to-wall meetings where ministers lock up their cellphones, a day that was especially hectic because it was the day that Queen Elizabeth II passed away. May she rest in peace. This was real evidence, Mr. Chair, but the Conservatives are just disregarding it to the point that Mr. Cooper has ridiculously suggested that the minister had some kind of burner phone that he used. How conspiratorial can we actually get here?
Are they going to accept to see the evidence? Let's see.
With that, Mr. Chair, I would like to move a subamendment to Mr. Barrett's amendment as proposed yesterday. It is that the committee delete the words “order Global Health Imports to submit the names of all past and present employees, in order to reveal the identity of the other 'Randy' referred to by Minister Randy Boissonnault”, and replace those words with, “request that Stephen Anderson produce for the committee all of his phone records and text messages from September 8, 2022”, and to keep the words at the end, “within 7 days of this motion being adopted”.