I can be brief, Mr. Chair.
I wholeheartedly agree with my colleague Mr. Barrett's suggestions to the other opposition members. I want to clarify a couple of loose threads that I think need to be focused on.
Canadians watching this may be left with the impression that there's nothing to see here, that Global News conducted a most thorough investigation on their own and the Liberal bench, including the Prime Minister, satisfied all the queries that opposition members made on this issue. However, this is a serious matter.
To Mr. Barrett's point, I know that good governance and high ethical standards are very elusive concepts for the NDP-Liberal government, but not for Canadians. The allegations are really damning. A minister, who had been a minister for close to a year, was communicating via a device to a company, demanding, within so many minutes, a $500,000 payment to a company that he still has a 50% interest in. The text message made it clear that there ought to be a partners meeting. Minister Boissonnault confirmed that he views himself as a partner. This was a two-partner company. What concerns me is that the Liberal bench could have cleared this up the moment the issue rose by simply identifying the surname of this other Randy. It amazes me the length to which the Liberal government will go to conceal the identity of this other Randy.
Canadians watching this are saying to themselves, “What's the big deal? If it's not Minister Boissonnault, then identify the person.” However, every Liberal member on this committee, as well as Liberal members in the House, is dodging, deflecting and not answering the question on the minds of Canadians. Clear this up. Why are we wasting government resources and arguing about this, with the filibustering not only today but last week? Canadians want government to work, and when they see the kind of gamesmanship that's happening right now and the attempts to not shed any sort of transparency and light on this, it is extremely concerning.
To answer Mr. Fisher, who said this committee has never been designed to be a judge and jury, well of course not, but our role as parliamentarians is to ask tough questions. Some of us have more skills than others in asking questions, probing questions, that might ultimately elicit a response from a commissioner and/or provide the basis by which we would extend an invitation to law enforcement to investigate, but that's our role. That's what we do day in and day out at committee. It is improper to equate this lawful parliamentary privilege and process as a means of acting as judge and jury. That's just not the case.
What's also concerning is that in the Global News report, Mr. Boissonnault's other partner flat out deliberately lied when he said that the other Randy is the head of logistics. The report indicated, in fact, that the head of logistics is Mr. Anderson's father, whose first name is not Randy. We're not talking about a large corporation. We're not talking about a multinational. We're talking about a small start-up company with maybe one or two other employees.
When asked by the Global News reporter to give them the surname of the other Randy, no one in the organization could answer, in much the same way that every Liberal member of this committee and this government has refused to give us the name of that person. That's why we are here. That's why I fully support Mr. Barrett's recommendation that we need the other Randy appear and/or have the government provide us with the surname so we can make our own inquiries.