Finance Committee on July 29th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

That would mean we'd reconvene at 7:05 p.m.

Yes, Mr. Poilievre.

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

On a point of order, Mr. Chair, this explanation makes absolutely no sense. Of course, we have meetings that go often well beyond midnight, with translation, with technical support, with technical tools on Parliament Hill that are far more complicated than Zoom.

I'm not exactly sure what technical expertise you say expires after seven o'clock, Mr. Clerk, because the average Canadian is using Zoom well into the late hours of the night. We know that our translators have often worked right through, from midnight through to the early morning hours—

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Mr. Poilievre—

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

—so there is no technical reason we cannot continue to meet. If this meeting is shut down, it will be because the Liberals, in their minority, are shutting down meetings to avoid having motions voted on.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

I am not looking at shutting down the meeting, Mr. Poilievre. If you could maybe prevent that accusation, it would be decent.

I am going to suspend the meeting for five minutes while we sort this out so that at least I'm comfortable with us continuing as long as we have to. I will suspend now to 7:06 eastern time.

The meeting is suspended.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

My apologies for the longer-than-necessary suspension, but we had a good chat.

Ms. Dzerowicz, you have the floor. Then we have Mr. Fragiskatos, and we will hopefully be able to go to a vote after that.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

I will wrap up. My main point was that I think it's unprecedented to have our Prime Minister come to committee at all. I think an hour is sufficient, and I also think an hour is sufficient with the chief of staff. I believe we have had enough witnesses; that has fulfilled the original mandate of the motion that was passed on July 6.

I'll say one more thing. We are still in a pandemic. To be honest, I believe the last four months were easy; I think the tough ones are yet to come. We have a lot of work ahead of us to restart and rebuild the economy, and to do so under so much uncertainty. There is so much great work that this committee could be doing in terms of looking at some of the tough decisions we need to make ahead, around our economy, around the sectors that desperately need support, around a green recovery, around looking at things like a universal basic income. There is so much more work that we could be putting our energy into. Maybe it's the idealist in me, but I just want, for one moment in time, for us to drop the partisan games and step up to be the government that the Canadian population needs at this time. Let's come together and bring our best ideas and our best energy to figuring out how we could chart a course past this unprecedented pandemic and how we could build a country that is more resilient, more equitable, more just and more prosperous.

That's where I'd like us to focus our attention: not the fishing expedition that's happening right now and not the theatrics, but our moving on to dealing with what is absolutely top of mind for Canadians today.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you, Ms. Dzerowicz.

I'm not sure who is up, Mr. Fragiskatos or Mr. Fraser.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I'm glad to go, Mr. Chair. If my colleague Mr. Fraser wants to follow, that's no problem.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Mr. Fragiskatos, the floor is yours.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

First of all, you're a modest man. You were attacked earlier. I have worked with you on this committee for two years now. I was first elected in 2015; you've been a mentor to new members of Parliament, and I still count myself as a new member of Parliament. I know you will not quote this, Mr. Chair, but I will quote from Maclean's magazine, just yesterday, and I hope Mr. Poilievre, who has suddenly disappeared, no surprise, is listening to this.

Maclean's said the following about yesterday's meeting. Under the heading “A Parliamentary committee is an infuriating forum for parsing questions of fact”, it goes on to say, “If it weren’t for the grace, chairmanship skills and occasional shouting of Liberal MP Wayne Easter, the committee hearing could at times have turned into a brawling disaster.” I think they're being a bit unfair to you, Chair, because you didn't really shout and you had to keep things in order.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Could we get back to the question we're on?

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I'm glad to focus on the main question, but when members of the committee have tried to attack the chair and the objectivity of the chair, not to mention what was said earlier about our clerk by Mr. Poilievre, which I'm still stunned by...or maybe I'm not stunned by it; anyway, I'll leave that aside.

Mr. Chair, you've been an excellent, objective, a very fair chair in our committee, and an extraordinarily parliamentarian for the better part of more than 25 years, if I'm not mistaken. I'll leave that part there.

Ms. Dzerowicz and Mr. Sorbara touched on these points too, but it needs to be underlined. The Prime Minister coming to a parliamentary committee is quite unprecedented in the history of this country, to say the least. It's interesting to me that when Mr. Poilievre had the opportunity to vote in favour of Mr. Harper coming to testify at a parliamentary committee in response to concerns around the Mike Duffy scandal, he did not vote in favour of that. He voted against that motion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

I think we are stretching quite a distance, Mr. Fragiskatos, from the motion.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I'm just putting those points on the record.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Could we go to the motion?

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Relating it back to the motion, of course, the motion calls for three hours for the Prime Minister and two hours for the chief of staff. My question is, to what end? The Conservatives have repeated themselves ad nauseam. Yesterday they started off with their questions, but then they kept asking those same sorts of questions. Sometimes these were just mirror images.

The questions kept on coming and there wasn't any difference in them. It was as if the Conservatives had exhausted their list of questions and just wanted to keep throwing mud at the wall as they could. With due respect to Mr. Fraser, he used that quote the other day in the meeting, and I think it's apt. Throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks seems to be the strategy of the Conservatives, but to what end? They haven't answered that here.

The Prime Minister of the country is being the Prime Minister of Canada, dealing with the pandemic. He is good enough to come to a committee, and the Conservatives haven't explained why he needs to come here for three hours.

I'll stop there, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Mr. Fraser, I believe you want in as the final point, and then we will go to a vote.

[Sean Fraser, Liberal, Central Nova, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll try not to take too much time. There are a couple of quick points I want to make.

I hope you can hear me. I'm trying to speak a little more quietly. For those who didn't have the benefit of a previous discussion, I've moved around in my house to make sure I can hear my daughter if she wakes up. There are some unique things that arise when you're dealing with Zoom meetings and scheduling concerns.

On the point of the motion, I find it a little bit odd that the Prime Minister is coming to the finance committee, as opposed to the other committees that are studying the same issue, given the nature of the motion we've passed. In any event, he has agreed to come. I think that's terrific. I made the point in our last meeting that I think three hours is a stretch. I think that some will agree and some will disagree with me on that point.

I want to take this opportunity to speak to the previous point of order. Again, I'm not trying to drag this on forever. I did take a different interpretation, not as a result of the Zoom meetings or the technical capacity, but based on the standing orders in Bosc and Gagnon. I found it a little bit odd that we had a disagreement on the way the meeting ended previously. Obviously, Mr. Chair, you were acting on the advice of the clerk at the time.

I looked into it, and I'll give you my thoughts. The standing orders in Bosc and Gagnon, as far as I can tell, don't explicitly rule that a committee meeting needs to continue after the scheduled hour of adjournment because there is debate ongoing.

The closest thing to a defined practice that I could find came from page 1,099 of Bosc and Gagnon, 2017 edition. It says:

A committee meeting may be adjourned by the adoption of a motion to that effect. However, most meetings are adjourned more informally, when the Chair receives the implied consent of members to adjourn. The committee Chair cannot adjourn the meeting without the consent of a majority of the members, unless the Chair decides that a case of disorder or misconduct is so serious as to prevent the committee from continuing its work.

My interpretation of this passage, unless I can be corrected, was that the chair can't, in the middle of a scheduled meeting, announce that the meeting should be adjourned and say, “We're halfway through; it's over”, without canvassing the membership first to see if, in fact, they want to adjourn.

This meeting would be a useful example. It was scheduled to end at 7:00. My argument would be that, Wayne, you couldn't have said at 6:30, “Hey, we're done folks, too bad if you disagree”, but at the time 7:00 rolled around, it would have been appropriate.

This is my personal interpretation. I'd be interested in what the clerk's finding on it may be. Honestly, my real concern—now that I think I'm managing with my daughter upstairs—is that I don't fall into this trap again. I don't want to create a scenario where every committee can become an indefinite exercise that we haven't planned for. If that was going to be the case going into a meeting, I think it would be helpful to know that it's possible we could be sitting indefinitely, so we could all plan accordingly.

I said I wouldn't speak too long. I have probably exceeded that expectation I set for myself, so I'll cut it off there. I would be interested in what the chair or the clerk's ruling may be, now or at another time.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

We will look into that at another time.

I read it similarly to you, Sean, but we'll go to the clerks for further advice on this because there are all kinds of different scenarios. It does say, “unless the Chair decides that a case of disorder or misconduct is so serious as to prevent the committee from continuing its work”, and we know that would never happen at this committee, so we should be all right there.

With that, I think we agreed earlier that after these number of speakers we would go to the vote. I would ask the clerk to read the motion again and then go to a recorded vote.

[The Clerk]

Thank you so much.

Bear with me for just one moment, and I will pull up the text of the motion from Mr. Poilievre.

That the Prime Minister appear for no less than three hours alone as a witness, on his own panel, and that Katie Telford appear for no less than two hours, alone as a witness, on her own panel, provided that the two appear separately.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

That's the motion. Now we go to a recorded vote.

(Motion agreed to: yeas 6; nays 5)

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Are we ready to adjourn?

No objections to adjourning?

[Pierre Poilievre, Conservative, Carleton, ON]

No objection, Mr. Chair, thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

The meeting is adjourned.