Evidence of meeting #44 for Finance in the 43rd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was chair.

A video is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Clerk of the Committee  Ms. Caroline Bosc

5:40 p.m.

Liberal

Michael McLeod Liberal Northwest Territories, NT

—but I wanted to make a couple of points.

First of all, I think some of this discussion that happened today maybe should have been handled by the subcommittee. Maybe we could have had a bit more organized strategy going forward.

I was wanting to suggest and I planned to suggest that we remove the “exhaustive list of witnesses” from the motion. We have the Prime Minister coming in front of the committee. We have the government operations committee studying this, and the ethics committee is also doing it.

Many people have said this, but we are in the middle of a pandemic. Having unlimited meetings, just going on and on for the sake of going on and on, I think, is going to become repetitive. If there's more information people want to bring to the surface or try to bring clarity on, I think that's fine. In the meantime, I'm still very concerned that we don't have a program in place for supporting young people. That, for me, is very important. I'm hoping that is something we'll be able to focus on too.

5:40 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter

Okay.

Do I see any disagreement? Mr. Poilievre has seen this as a friendly amendment. We don't need to vote on it if everybody's in favour of what Mr. Fraser and Mr. Poilievre together have proposed.

(Motion as amended agreed to [See Minutes of Proceedings])

Okay. I see agreement on that.

We will call a subcommittee meeting, if it can be arranged, for Friday, to give time to the clerk to get her work done as well.

Is that it?

5:40 p.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

I have another motion, Mr. Chair.

5:40 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter

Just before we move to your motion, go ahead, Madam Clerk..

5:40 p.m.

The Clerk

Before we move on, I just want to make sure we have agreement, then, on Monsieur Poilievre's motion as amended, without a recorded vote.

5:40 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter

Yes. We are all agreed.

Go ahead, Mr. Poilievre.

5:45 p.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

Okay. This motion should be less controversial.

It reads, “That all witnesses who have appeared and will appear release all written communications (texts, emails, messenger service app and any other means of communication) that they have had since March 1, 2020, with Craig Kielburger, Marc Kielburger and anyone else with the WE Charity or any organization of which Craig and/or Marc Kielburger hold ownership, management or directorship positions.”

5:45 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter

Okay. You're going to have to read it another time.

One of the difficulties with virtual meetings is that we don't have the writing in front of us.

Read it fairly slowly, if you could, Mr. Poilievre.

5:45 p.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

Sure.

I'll just tell my staff to email this motion to the clerk so that the clerk will have it in writing.

It reads as follows: “That all witnesses who have appeared and will appear release all written communications (texts, emails, messenger service app and any other means of communication) that they have had since March 1, 2020, with Craig Kielburger, Marc Kielburger and anyone else with the WE Charity or any organization of which Craig and/or Marc Kielburger hold ownership, management or directorship positions.”

5:45 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter

Okay. It's up for discussion. Do I see any hands?

I see Mr. Fraser, Ms. Dzerowicz, Mr. Julian and then Mr. Fragiskatos.

Mr. Cooper, was your hand up too? Okay.

Go ahead, Mr. Fraser.

5:45 p.m.

Liberal

Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have a couple of concerns, and there are a couple of pieces of information that I think I'm going to want. Again, not having these things in writing in advance does make it challenging to deal with them on the fly.

First, before I got into politics, I was in litigation. I think Mr. Morantz is a fellow lawyer, and Mr. Cooper is as well. I practised out west, mostly. I probably would have bumped into Mr. Cooper had I stayed a little longer and both of us had never chosen this profession.

One thing I always found immensely frustrating was when there would be an exercise to essentially conduct a fishing expedition rather than have a targeted and reasonable approach to get information that was likely to add value to the matters at hand. I can't assess on a moment's notice which of the two approaches this motion constitutes. I wouldn't mind having time to conduct that analytical exercise on my own.

Madam Clerk, I'm wondering if you could point to the language that was used in the earlier motion for the production of documents so that it's not simply a duplicative effort to get at more information for the sake of simply having the exercise drag on. If there's more information that needs to come out with respect to the matters at hand, then I don't have a problem having that information form part of this committee's assessment and analysis. However, I do want to avoid what appears to be a continued effort to just throw more at the wall, over and over and over, in an exhaustive way—not to double down on that word yet again.

If you do have access, Madam Clerk, I'd be curious to see the previously adopted document production motion that we supported and that was passed by this committee.

5:45 p.m.

The Clerk

Yes. I have it front of me. I can read it out. It was adopted on July 7.

It says, “That the committee order that any contracts concluded with WE Charity and Me to We, all briefing notes, memos and emails from senior officials, including the contribution agreement between the government and the organization, prepared for or sent to any minister regarding the design and creation of the Canada student service grant, as well as any written correspondence and records of other correspondence with WE Charity and Me to We from March 2020 be provided to the committee no later than August 8, 2020”.

5:50 p.m.

Liberal

Sean Fraser Liberal Central Nova, NS

Just so that I can contrast the two, as I'm somebody who's always learned better with paper in front of me, one thing I'm trying to discern is the difference between the new motion....

Pierre, maybe you can answer this, unless the clerk has the language right there. Are we dealing with things like just private communications, or is this stuff that touches on the Canada student service grant? It seems a bit odd.

There's another concern that I have. Although I wasn't present for this particular testimony, I believe we had a journalist appear before the committee as well. I have some questions around that in its own right, but I'd be curious to know whether you'd be looking for things from journalistic sources and the like. I think there might be more difficulty here than meets the eye at first blush.

I'm wondering whether the clerk or Pierre would care to shed a bit of light on that. That's something that I'd need to sort out before I could have an informed vote on this particular motion, which strikes me as a bit much, but I'm willing to listen.

5:50 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter

I'll go back to Mr. Poilievre on that question, and then go to Ms. Dzerowicz.

Do you want to answer that question, Mr. Poilievre? What's it related to in terms of individual privacy concerns as well?

5:50 p.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

It's related to the origin of the entire Canada student service grant. That's really one of the essential mysteries of this entire saga—where did this strange and exotic program come from, given that we already have a Canada summer jobs program that could very easily have funded the creation of additional positions for students at charities and non-profits across the country? What on God's green earth would have compelled the government to completely duplicate that existing program and then farm it out to a third party that just happened to have paid the Prime Minister's family 300 grand and happened to have taken the finance minister on a $41,000 vacation?

The government continues to imply, without saying it, that it was the public service that came up with this idea. They imply it by saying that the final recommendation came from the public service. I have no doubt that the government is going to be able to produce some document somewhere that shows that after weeks and weeks of insisting by political staffers and ministers, somebody in the bureaucracy was forced to put their name on a so-called “recommendation” to create this strange program and direct it to this particular embattled organization. We need to know how this all came about and what conversations led to its genesis.

The reason I'm not circumscribing the kinds of communications to mention the Canada student service grant is that we've seen how Jesuitical the government can be. For example, we had the Minister of Diversity come before this committee and say that she did not discuss the Canada student service grant with WE at any point ever. We all left thinking that she had not been in contact with the group. Well, we learned a day or two later in a news report that she had spoken with the group and that she spoke with Mr. Kielburger directly, but they didn't talk about something that at that time was called the “Canada student service grant”. The words “Canada student service grant” were not used in that particular order, and therefore she thought, cleverly, that she could say she had never discussed that issue with them.

This grant experienced a very slow development of its branding, over many weeks. It is entirely possible that there will be all kinds of communications that led to its creation that don't mention the grant itself. It would not be appropriate simply to limit the committee's request to communications in which the program entitled “Canada student service grant” would be mentioned. Rather, it should be limited by time. I'm not interested in seeing every text message that Craig Kielburger has had with every minister going back a decade. At this critical period during which this program went from unthinkable to imagined to supported to named to funded to retroactively granted, that chronology needs to become known. That's why I put forward this motion to make it known.

Mr. Fraser is concerned that journalistic communications might get caught up in this. I would be prepared to say, “...that all government witnesses, including exempt staff”. That would deal with his concern. It would just be a friendly amendment, right after the word “all” and before the word “witnesses”, saying “that all government witnesses, including exempt staff, who have appeared or will appear release all written communications (texts...”, and so on and so forth.

5:55 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter

Okay.

I have Ms. Dzerowicz, Mr. Julian, and Mr. Fragiskatos.

I have to ask the clerk a question.

Where it says, “all witnesses who have appeared or will appear before the committee—

5:55 p.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

Yes. It should read “or will”.

5:55 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter

“Or will” means it's retroactive. I'll have to ask the clerk for advice on this.

Is that motion in order in terms of going retroactively?

I'll give the clerk a little time to think about it, because witnesses have appeared in good faith, and now we're going to retroactively go back and say, “Look, you have to provide all your correspondence.” That might, to my mind, get into privacy issues.

Ms. Dzerowicz is next, and then Mr. Julian.

5:55 p.m.

Liberal

Julie Dzerowicz Liberal Davenport, ON

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

I want to say that the motion that we are currently functioning under, the original finance motion, says that as part of our study on COVID-19, we will hold hearings in July 2020, for no less than four meetings, for a duration of three hours each, to examine how much the government spent in awarding the $912 million, sole-source contract to WE Charity and how the outsourcing of the Canada student service grant to WE Charity proceeded as far as it did, and that the committee will produce a report of its findings to be tabled in the House of Commons.:

Then there was a list of witnesses.

That was our mandate, but now it's starting to feel, with this additional motion—I'm like Mr. Fraser, and I need to see it in front of me to really absorb it—as though it's an investigation into the Kielburgers or an investigation into the WE foundation. I feel as though we're now starting to get away from what we were mandated to do, which is to examine how much money we spent on this, whether there was financial mismanagement, and how we reached this decision. In other words, was there any funny business in how we actually reached this decision?

There is a ton of data coming our way, and I want to thank the clerk so much for reading that slowly and very accurately. Thank you for that.

I'd also like to remind everybody that every single witness from whom we have asked for additional information has indicated absolutely that they would forward the information, so I'm starting to feel a little bit uncomfortable about what exactly we are asking for at this point.

I also want to respond to Mr. Poilievre's statement that we are implying that there was no involvement by the Prime Minister or by any of the ministers in directing our civil servants to actually select WE.

What I'd like to put on the record is that it's actually our public service that has clearly articulated that it was they who actually suggested and put forward WE Charity as the recommendation and the selection to deliver the CSSG program, based on the limited amount of time they had to come up with a group to be able to deliver it. We had that confirmed by our Clerk of the Privy Council, Ian Shugart. We have also had that confirmed by Gina Wilson, our senior associate deputy minister of Diversity, Inclusion and Youth, and it was stated by our senior assistant deputy minister of the skills and employment branch, Rachel Wernick. There is zero evidence of anything to the contrary that we have heard so far, any evidence that any minister, any prime minister, or anybody within our cabinet might have directed any public servant to actually select only WE Charity as the charity to deliver the Canada student service grant.

Quite honestly, Mr. Chair, I am not understanding the value of this additional information. Maybe I do not have an issue. Maybe I need to look at the statement of what is being proposed, but it just feels as though we're starting to move into something more personal, away from what our original intention was before this committee in terms of investigating the financial spending on this contribution agreement as well as how the decision to select WE Charity to deliver the Canada student service grant actually transpired.

Those are my comments for the moment, Mr. Chair.

6 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter

Okay.

I'm adding Mr. Morantz to the list, so it will be Mr. Julian, Mr. Fragiskatos and Mr. Morantz.

Go ahead, Mr. Julian.

6 p.m.

NDP

Peter Julian NDP New Westminster—Burnaby, BC

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I think I agree with the principle of the motion. The principle is basically extending the motion that we adopted on July 7.

On July 7 we specifically referred to memos, emails and briefing notes from WE Charity and ME to WE. Subsequent to that, the revelations over the last three weeks really should allow us to refine how we're approaching this. First, we found out that the WE submission occurred the very same day that the Prime Minister announced the program. It is unlikely that we'll find briefing notes around this when what essentially happened was a simultaneous announcement of a program and a submission to run the program.

Second, we found out that it was not a contract signed with WE but rather with the WE Charity Foundation. The liability issues, of course, that we've been hearing about over the last few days are substantial because of the fact that it was signed with a different entity. Of course, the issue of Canada summer jobs continues to be relevant. There was a cutback in the number of positions offered at the time of a pandemic, when we really needed to see the number of student positions expanded. Many businesses and many organizations suffered, here in my neck of the woods in New Westminster—Burnaby and right across the country.

I think the intent is a very good one, but I think there need to be a number of changes. I understand having text and emails and messages, because we're finding out that it happened simultaneously. It's unlikely to be the memos, emails and briefing notes that we talked about originally. I believe the complexity of the number of organizations around WE and for-profit businesses means that we need to certainly talk about organizations or for-profit businesses that are connected with the WE family. As we've heard, there are about a dozen different entities. These weren't covered in the original motion that I brought forward for July 7.

I think there's a good intent here. I'm not convinced that we're going to be able to come to a consensus for this meeting, but we do have many opportunities now that we've expanded the study. The steering committee is meeting on Friday. I think there's an opportunity to refine and put forward a motion like this that actually gets us to the heart of many of the questions that have come up since the original request for documents was made three weeks ago. The ground is different now. We've found out many things that we didn't know on July 7. Expanding it beyond just the ME to WE and the WE Charity is important, including the for-profit businesses connected with the family.

Second, there's ensuring that we have text messages that might well go beyond the standard process. There's clearly not a standard process here at all. Bureaucrats weren't even aware of the details, and you had a submission coming the same day as the Prime Minister making his announcement.

I think there's something we can work on. Perhaps committee members want to refine it now, but I also think we have an opportunity in the next few days to come back to this issue, refine it, and adopt the motion that I think folks would be prepared to support. I would be offering some amendments today, but I'm not sure it's necessary to adopt it today. It could be something that we adopt over the next few days.

6:05 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter

Mr. Poilievre is next.

6:05 p.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, I think both Mr. Fraser and Mr. Julian raised some good points. This was a very complicated motion to write, precisely because of the octopus-like nature of the WE organization. All of the numbered companies, the foundations and the related entities that are part of it made it very complicated to write a motion that would capture everything we were looking for.

I would invite Mr. Julian, and anyone else who wants to, to work with me over the next day. Perhaps at the end of the testimony from the Kielburgers tomorrow, when they leave the stage, we could revisit the motion and have an opportunity to put forward something with wording that's fine-tuned to the liking of committee members.

That will save us the time of thrashing it out right now. We could just put it aside and deal with it tomorrow.

6:05 p.m.

Liberal

The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter

If you could withdraw the motion, then, and bring it forward at a later date, I was going to suggest....

I mean, I don't want to rule it out of order—at least, not as yet—but I do think that the implications of the way the motion is currently worded are very broad. It may get into some privacy issues. It may put a chill on witnesses wanting to come before committee if we retroactively ask them to provide any of the correspondence, etc. I'd like to see it in writing, and maybe run it by the law clerk, for that matter, to make sure we're on fair ground, if I can put it that way.

Are you pulling it back, Mr. Poilievre, and we'll think about it and bring it forward with maybe a little more clarity to it? Is that what I'm hearing?

6:05 p.m.

Conservative

Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON

Yes, that's fine.