Thank you, Chair.
It appears that this is where I came into this committee. It was regarding this Mr. Anderson. It seems so sinister, this Mr. Anderson, who apparently has been playing fast and loose in using the name of Minister Boissonnault in his business dealings on a multiple of occasions.
I seem to remember that when I came in we were seeing the Ethics Commissioner for I think something like the third time, apparently. We were questioning the Ethics Commissioner regarding these texts. The commissioner had reiterated how he had conducted his investigation, and he was very clear about how he goes about his work. He's an independent officer of Parliament. He obviously takes this very seriously. It's the credibility not only of not him, but of that institution, that role, that is coming under question when members of Parliament, particularly members of the official opposition, don't get what they want and repeatedly call for further investigations and, indeed, are questioning the report that the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner put forth to us.
Indeed, Minister Boissonnault provided those text messages. I remember looking at them and saying, like, “Okay, what is this?” It was a banal thing about some kind of telecom thing or something, you know, and to check back—the sort of routine thing when you leave a place of work and somebody's looking for a contact. He said, “No, I'm not involved in this anymore and please contact the person who is handling this business.”
It's this kind of mishmash of bits and pieces of text messages and WhatsApp messages and so on, which actually showed that the minister had nothing to do with the business dealings of this Mr. Anderson, but this Mr. Anderson certainly demonstrated, from what I understand—now, I wasn't there for his testimony, but I'm sure that colleagues here will fill us in—that he was very free and easy, apparently, with using the name of the minister. From what I'm told about the character and conduct of that person, it certainly appears that he was doing it for his own purposes, his own profit and his own ends.
It's a kind of lesson to all of us to be careful about who we get involved with when that day comes and we find ourselves in the private sector. Again, in fact, I found it very interesting at that point, when I came into this committee, that the Ethics Commissioner was able to talk about the rules around conflict of interest and the responsibilities of members. Indeed, we heard something of that earlier in the week when we heard from the Lobbying Commissioner, did we not?
At the same time, we have just completed what I think was a very fulsome report around misinformation and disinformation, and I know there are other motions on the table that concern the privacy of Canadians.
I was very glad, Chair, that you were able to arrange for the testimony of the big four—Facebook, X, TikTok and.... Which was the other one? Maybe there were two of them from Facebook. I forget now. I and my constituents were very glad to see that this committee was undertaking work to question les géants du Web, as we call them in French, about the safeguarding of confidential data. How is that data used in algorithms, for marketing purposes and so on? I think this, again, goes to how we need to be very mindful that these bits and pieces—text messages and so on—people are trying to put together to create a case.... I don't think it's worthy of the work of this committee.
What Mr. Genuis brought up is interesting, because that was from another committee I was sitting on—public accounts. We were made aware that there are companies specializing in indigenous procurement. They obtain public contracts by using the set-aside for indigenous procurement.
You know, Chair, I'm a paper person. My staff is trying to wean me off paper, but I have this with me. This is from David Yeo, who was very proud to tell us that not only was he a co-owner of Dalian Enterprises and using indigenous.... I'm sure this is being studied in public accounts. He is also a Conservative member. He was very proud to show us that. This was his claim to fame, how he was able to attract customers. It was because he was able to attract contracts for them.
Again, I wouldn't say that it's a grey area. I think it's quite clear that people need to conduct themselves—