Mr. Ste-Marie, go ahead.
Evidence of meeting #1 for Finance in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was chair.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #1 for Finance in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was chair.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm not sure I am following the debate correctly, but as I understand it, Mr. Gerretsen is telling us what the redacted parts contain. I would like to know how he got this information. Is this not a breach of trust? How can a Liberal member have access to this information when all members don't have access to it?
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Am I obliged to answer questions when I've been interrupted, or would the member like to wait? That's not a point of order. If he wants to wait until he has the opportunity—
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
I'm happy to answer the question, but it's not a point of order.
Bloc
Gabriel Ste-Marie Bloc Joliette, QC
Mr. Gerretsen, a Liberal member who is not a member of this committee, appears to have information that the other members do not have. That is unacceptable, and I demand an explanation for it.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
I'm happy to explain that, Mr. Chair, and I'll do it; but before I do, I just want to say for the record that this is not a point of order. This is a member who clearly didn't open his email who is now challenging me as to why I did open my email and he didn't. That's what's going on here. This is not a point of order. Nonetheless, we all received these documents from the government House leader.
I don't know what to tell you, Mr. Ste-Marie. Please open your emails and you'll receive this, because that's what I'm going through. I'm going through this information that everybody received.
If you're okay with that, I'll continue.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
I have a lot more to go through. I'm only discussing my sixth page out of 151, so I really want to get down to this.
As I was saying, the document that came from the PCO was titled “Increased Support for Canadian Youth and Students”. This goes into a lot of the details about money, including where the money came from, why it was important, why these programs were being developed, the Minister of Finance's ultimate decision, and all this stuff. None of it is blacked out. It is all right there. None of it is blacked out. Again, this would have been a great page that Mr. Poilievre could have waved around that had nothing blacked out on it.
If you go to the next page, now you have a full page. Just so everybody's with me—I know everyone's following along closely—I'm on page 106 right now. This page specifically has three programs on it. This is marked “Secret” and “Confidence of the Queen's Privy Council”. This one is obviously setting out details about programs that were used to compile the information. Two of the programs in here, the youth employment and skills development program and Canada student loans, were not relevant, so they were completely blacked out. They were not asked for in the motion, so they were completely blacked out. On the one that you do see in there, the reason it was important to provide this page was that a paragraph at the bottom specifically goes into the Canada emergency student benefit. This lists off everything with respect to the briefings and the eligibility for students and the extension to all post-secondary students, including those in college, whether part time or full time.
The point is that if we asked those officials to come here, which this motion is trying to do, they would have the opportunity to answer these questions. They'd say that they blacked out these large areas because they had stuff to do with other issues. They even left the titles in there so that at least you knew what they were blacking out. That's the irony here: They didn't even black out the titles. They left the titles in there so that you knew exactly what they were blacking out. You ended up with just this little paragraph at the bottom that was relevant to the motion.
Then you go to the next page of that same document. It continues on with two additional points as they relate to that particular program. Then it starts to go into other programs where again stuff is blacked out, but then you have another area that is germane to the motion. It goes on to talk about the CSSG program again and everything that was offered in that.
You'll see this happening over and over again. It might make for great theatre in terms of being able to wave around papers and say, “Hey, see everything that was blacked out?” I know that when the time comes for Mr. Poilievre to see what was actually blacked out there, he's going to have nothing. He's going to fall flat, because there is nothing there. My motive here, as I've stated before, is to make sure that those who did do this are not found to have breached privileges of Parliament because they did exactly what they were supposed to do. It's unfortunate that we can't let them come here to tell us this.
I'm now at the bottom of page 108, in section 69. You will see that it references the Canada student service grant again. It says:
In your announcement, you indicated that the grants in support of post secondary studies would be available for students helping to fight against COVID-19 this summer. You also announced that the grant value would be between $1,000 and $5,000, depending on the number of hours. The remaining details including eligibility criteria, scalability, specific amounts based on hours and delivery mechanism have yet to be determined.
Then, of course, on the next page—I know everyone's following along—there's that section that talks about the WE social entrepreneurship initiative. It goes into the details about that, about a $500 grant for a 10-week mentorship program. It finally comes to the PCO recommendation. The PCO's recommendation is all there, except for the one portion that is blacked out again, and it's clearly marked that it's not relevant.
You're getting the reason it's been blacked out. We keep coming back to this point of what could possibly be here.
I'm on page 111 of that submission. From the PCO release, it's pages 189 to 190. We're looking at an email between Rachel Wernick and Ms. Shannon from PCO. As the motion expressly stated, unrelated cabinet confidences were removed. They're unrelated. As well, Ms. Wernick's cellphone was removed. I don't know why Mr. Poilievre would want Ms. Wernick's cellphone number, but I think it's entirely her privilege to have that cellphone number distributed only to those who need it, nor do I think providing that phone number would be necessary or have any relevance to the issue at hand that this committee was looking for.
I think we can all agree that we wouldn't want that phone number to be out in public. However, the entire email and all the details about it, from Rachel to Tara and back and forth, it's all there, except for those details that are the missing phone numbers. It brings us back to the point about why we even need to have this information out there when it's completely irrelevant. People deserve to have that privacy.
Turning to page 191 now of the PCO release, we have another email between Ms. Wernick and Ms. Shannon. Again, only the cellphone number has been removed. This one is from May 7, 2020 at 3:14 in the afternoon. They discussed the intent of the policy and they go back and forth in multiple emails. All the email addresses are available. They're .gc.ca email addresses. Everything is available in there except where it says “Mobile:” and Ms. Wernick's phone number. That's the only thing that's been blacked out from there. Again, I have no clue why Mr. Poilievre would be offended by the fact that the phone number has been blacked out.
Going to pages 192 to 193 of that PCO release, we have another redaction due to a cellphone number. Again, I think we can all agree that the removal of such information is completely reasonable.
I find it interesting that while the public is battling the second wave of COVID-19, my colleagues are chasing down private cellphone numbers of people. I don't know what the motive is, but I'm sure they have a motive.
The point is that you see this entire email, which starts on Thursday, May 7 at 3:22 p.m. It starts off with Ms. Wernick, who says, “Wonderful, thanks [for the information]”. It's a back-and-forth conversation between them.
I'm not going to lie; it's not the most entertaining stuff to read. It's definitely not juicy, nor does it have that smoking gun that apparently Mr. Poilievre was looking for. Therefore, I guess he decided that chasing down a mobile phone number or searching for other information that's completely unrelated to those programs must have the.... I don't know, maybe buried in there is even the discovery of who the second gunman on the grassy knoll was. I have absolutely no idea.
The point is that so much information is being provided here. The only stuff that isn't being provided is the information that is specifically irrelevant or confidential in terms of being somebody's phone number.
We can look at pages 219 to 221 of the PCO document release. Frankly, this is truly extraordinary. It is a document that would rarely ever be released. It never would have been released under the Harper government, I'm sure, unless Mr. Lake wants to correct me on the Harper government's incredible openness and transparency. This goes into a synopsis of the entire cabinet meeting. Obviously, this would be protected by confidence, but these details are in there. It's there for them to see. It's stuff that, as it relates to this particular issue, has not been held back.
We have another page—the next page. If it had not been for the one bullet and sub-bullet at the bottom of page 220, that one little section there that relates to the Canada student service grant, this page would never have even been included, because the entire page would have been irrelevant. The only way to provide the five or six lines there that are relevant is to black out the other sections.
Of course, Mr. Poilievre takes this and flashes it around and makes it seem like it's a smoking gun because we're covering up massive conspiracies—or at least he's trying to drum up those conspiracies—but the reality is that this page would never have even been provided had that bullet about the Canada student service grant at the bottom not been there. That's the only reason they had to get rid of the rest of it. The next page, because the bullet continues from there and leads into the next page, is completely non-redacted.
If there are still people out there among the public—and we're now 11 hours into this—who are watching and listening to this, I hope they can appreciate, though perhaps I'm not doing a great job of explaining it, what we're talking about in the redacted documents.
This is a perfect example. We have a page here, starting at page 220, about four-fifths of which, I would say, has been redacted. The only reason is that the information there was not germane to the motion. Then, in the next bullet, the part about the Canada student service grant starts. The following page, the entire page, is not redacted, because it relates to the Canada student service grant and the PCO's comment on where things were going and coming from, so it's entirely appropriate to share.
It's no different from copying and pasting, if you were to just copy and paste the relevant parts. The problem is—and again this goes to those people who may be paying attention to this—that rather than explain this to you, rather than think that the public is educated enough to be able to.... No, let me rephrase that. When somebody takes the one page that has the major part of the redaction and waves it around, it appears as though they are assuming the public is going to buy in right away and say, “Hey, this isn't the government being transparent; they blacked out everything.” I understand why the theatrics of it play off so well, but it's the reality of how these documents are released.
As the document continues, as you go into pages 220 and 221, it really starts to talk about the details and PCO comment, and it turns to the Deputy Prime Minister to provide the key takeaways from it. Literally, it's all there for everybody to read.
There is another email, on page 222, which references pages 254 to 256 of the PCO release. Once again, we find a redacted part, and—you guessed it, folks—it's the personal and private cellphone numbers of a staff member, again something that would never be released in an ATIP, but something that Mr. Poilievre is obsessed with obtaining.
If you go into the details of the email, you can read the entire email. It's from Tara Shannon, again, going to Ms. Shannon Nix. It just goes back and forth about the partnership, about struggling to deliver on the existing programs, not having the capacity to take on more placements and so on. The second part goes into the CSC programming not being funded and so on, and it goes into the details of that.
My point is that nothing was redacted here that was germane to what is going on and what the committee was seeking to get through this motion. The only thing in this that has been redacted is the telephone number, both in French and in English. Her signature at the bottom is in English first and then in French, and the phone number in both versions of the signature has been redacted.
That's it, Mr. Chair. Everything else in there is totally available.
We can go on to the next email, an exchange between Ms. Wernick and Mr. Philip Jennings from the PCO. In it, they are discussing an attachment that Ms. Wernick has forwarded to the PCO. I know that the opposition has a lot of interest in Ms. Wernick; however, only one item here has been redacted. Can anybody guess it? Does anybody know? The cellphone number is the only part of this that's redacted.
See, this is what I find so fascinating. Mr. Poilievre didn't jump up to the podium there and start flashing around these papers saying, “Why isn't Ms. Wernick's phone number being shown to us? Why is it being redacted?” Of course not. He doesn't get theatre out of that. But that's the reality of all the documents that have been submitted.
Again, she talks about the attachment, being the proposal. Everything is in there: who it was sent to, when it was sent, what the PDF is called, her signature again, and then her phone number has been blacked out.
We get to confidence with regard to another document here, which would be the next one. We have another synopsis of a meeting, another cabinet scenario. Here again, it's another one of Mr. Poilievre's fully blacked-out documents that he wanted to wave around. The reality of the situation is that the parts of it that are blacked out are the parts that have absolutely nothing to do with the motion that this committee had asked for. However, the reason it was important to provide all of that—including the cover sheet, including the synopsis, and having all of it—was that, on the next page, which is the first page that becomes relevant, all of a sudden you have the part about the Canada student service grant.
This is happening time and time again in these documents, where these large sections are being blacked out, but the reality is that the only parts being blacked out are the parts that are completely irrelevant to the motion. When you do get to the parts that are relevant, then you get everything on the Canada student service grant. I mean, I don't know; perhaps Mr. Poilievre was hoping to get something else out of cabinet confidence that he was digging around for, and that's why he's upset that parts of this are blacked out. But the reality is that he got exactly what he asked for. The committee got exactly what they asked for.
With regard to my amendment, which we're speaking to right now, the reason I think it's so important for us to have a discussion about this and to pass this amendment is so that the people who did these redactions can come here and explain things.
Excuse me while I take a sip of water here, Mr. Chair.
They can say one of two things. They can come here and say, no, Gerretsen is totally incorrect; all the stuff we blacked out there was WE-related stuff and we just didn't want you to see it. Or they can come here and do what is probably the most plausible thing that we would see. We would see them come here and probably validate everything that my colleagues and I have been saying today on this issue, which is that the items that were redacted were items that were completely irrelevant and didn't have anything to do with supporting this particular motion. I'm sure we would end up seeing that, if that's the case; I have no doubt about it.
You know, people were asking why I'm suggesting motive by the opposition. Well, why wouldn't you want them to come here and confirm whether or not what I'm saying is true? I can't understand that. I find it incumbent on us to make sure that this voice is heard.
If you go to the next page, which is page 351 of that document, it continues to go right on. The PCO comment on this particular program is in two bullets there. Then it blacks out the rest. It blacks out the rest because it is completely unrelated. A really good sign to know that this is actually what's happening is the fact that in these documents, which are clearly PDF documents or some form of Word or something like that, you're not seeing lines here and there. It's not like you're seeing paragraphs and within the paragraphs words being blacked out, or sentences being blacked out. You don't see any of that in these documents.
What you do see in these documents are entire sections that are clearly coming before or after sections that relate to this program and sections that relate to the request that was made by the committee to get this information. That is a massive signal that what you're getting here is the reality of what was related to this particular motion, the CSSG program in particular.
I think people should take note of the fact that in a page or two of relevant information, not a single word, phrase, sentence or paragraph has been redacted. It's the entire portion that's related to this program.
I cannot wrap my head around the fact that the opposition would allow government officials, who are non-partisan, and parliamentary officers, who are non-partisan, to have their careers stained by the notion that they contributed to infringing upon the privilege of members of Parliament.
I can't understand, when it's so obvious that this is the case, why members of the opposition.... I get why the Conservatives are doing it. They've been doing this since day one, since I arrived on the Hill. They've been like this right from the beginning. I don't know what it is. Maybe they just don't have any good ideas. All they ever want to do is talk about the Prime Minister and everything he's doing that they perceive to be some kind of scandal. They don't want to offer actual substance.
But I'm shocked to see this coming from my colleagues from the Bloc and the NDP. I've always appreciated the fact that they want to stand up for the public servants we have. This is a glaring example of how they're not doing that.
I'm at a loss for words when it comes to that, Mr. Chair, because our public servants are the institution. They're the bedrock of how Parliament functions. Think about it. We politicians come and go. Of the people sitting around this table, some of us will be here after the election and some of us won't, and some of us will be gone after the election after that. However, those public servants, the clerks and the people who create the bedrock for the institution to function are the people we're talking about. These are the people who are being affected by this, Mr. Chair.
What's going on, Mr. Chair? Are we in a conference call?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter
Just a moment. I heard somebody else coming on the line.
It's okay. We'll go back to Mr. Gerretsen.
I never noticed, Mr. Gerretsen, that you were at a loss for words, so I'll let you go again.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Thank you. I'm only on page 28 of 151, Mr. Chair. I have a lot more to offer on this. If nobody else is going to defend these public servants, and if I can do my part, then I'm going to do that, because I think it is incredibly important.
We're back to this scenario where, as I was saying before a conference call interrupted us, I'm just shocked. I'm shocked that the NDP and the Bloc would suggest that non-partisan government officials go down with this ship. I understand the political attacks. I even understand the sport the Conservatives get engaged in even when it comes to personal attacks. It's one thing to attack parliamentarians. We're fair game. We have the stage. We have a soap box we can stand on and defend ourselves.
There is a rule when you get into politics, Mr. Chair, when you're an elected official. I learned this the hard way, I will say. I learned this the hard way, and I'll never forget this, because I think it's really important. It goes to this issue of how we treat public servants. That's really what my amendment is about. Rule number one is that you never attack or impugn motive on staff, because they can't defend themselves.
I learned that the hard way. I think it was my first or second meeting when I was a city councillor. There was a big issue. We had just come off the election and were debating an issue. I really went after one of the city commissioners at the time. Afterwards, a gentleman who had been involved in the community a long time—I won't name him—came up to me and said, “You know, the way you treated that staff person, you should never put them in that situation,” and he really reamed me out over it.
In retrospect, I learned a lot from that. I learned a lot from that opportunity, because I realized that we need to be better when it comes to taking care of our staff. At the next meeting, the first thing I did, Mr. Chair, was to raise a point of order at the beginning of the meeting and apologize to that staff member for what I had done, because it wasn't right. In the same spirit, the lesson I learned that day from that individual—he was a former principal of Queen's University, to be totally honest, though I still won't name him—I continue to carry around with me to this day.
Back to Mr. MacGregor's point, I'm not willing to just let this go, because this is about the integrity of officials, of parliamentary officers. I don't think it's appropriate that they're being treated this way, not being able to come and defend themselves. In the amount of time I've spoken just in this session, they could have defended themselves and answered some pretty quick questions about this, but of course the Conservatives don't want that. They don't want them to come and explain themselves, because it will completely discredit Mr. Poilievre's motive of trying to advance conspiracy theories, like the ones that, by the way, he shares from The Post Millennial. I can't believe Mr. Poilievre is retweeting The Post Millennial. I'll leave it at that. It's almost as bad as when the Conservatives get up and quote the Fraser Institute as a reliable source of information, but I digress.
I'll go back to what I was reading here. From page 364 to 380, we have the actual funding agreement between WE and the Government of Canada, which was released by the PCO. Again, the professional public service redacted personal contact information. That's it. Mr. Poilievre, in all the ammunition that he's looking for, has the document entitled, “Canada's COVID-19 economic response plan: support for students and recent graduates, funding agreement between Her Majesty the Queen in right of Canada as represented by the Minister of Employment and Social Development (herein referred to as 'Canada') and WE Charity Foundation (herein referred to as 'the Recipient') hereinafter collectively referred to 'the Parties'”.
If there is going to be a smoking gun, Mr. Poilievre, I hate to rain on your parade—
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Oh, sorry.
Mr. Chair, if there was ever to be a smoking gun, this is where Mr. Poilievre would have found that, in this document. This is the actual funding agreement. Guess what's redacted from this? Absolutely nothing. It's only the private cellphone numbers and contact information of people, not even their names. It goes into the “whereas” clauses and the resolve clauses. It has the interpretation and definitions. It goes on to the dates and duration. It has everything in there, Mr. Chair. Everything is in there that has the details of this plan.
This is where you were going to find it, if you were going to find it anywhere. This would have been everything that you were looking for, but unfortunately, while everybody was focusing on everything else that was going on with the pandemic, Mr. Chair, how I interpret it is that Mr. Poilievre was probably just going through this document, digging up and looking for the smoking gun in here, and he just couldn't find it. So what did he do? He went back to these previous documents that I referenced earlier. These are the documents where portions had been redacted because they're completely irrelevant to the motion that this committee had passed. This contractual agreement goes on for 11 pages before it gets to the signatory page, 11 pages with 37 parts with subparts and sub-subparts that they could be critiquing.
Mr. Chair, Mr. Poilievre could have been there with his staff—I'm sure they did—just drilling into every little detail of this agreement, looking for that little part that says so and so is going to get all this money, and it's going to be great, isn't it? No, because it's just not there. He was never going to find that and he knew it wasn't there. He looked through this. He read the agreement. They probably sat there in dismay thinking, “Oh no, what are we going to do now? We don't have the smoking gun that we thought we had. Oh, I have an idea. Let's go back to the redacted parts from earlier on where they redacted the whole page, and we'll say, ha, see what they're missing. They've taken everything that we had and they've redacted the whole thing, everything that we were supposed to get.” Meanwhile, it was parts of an Excel spreadsheet that had absolutely nothing to do with this actual motion, the actual documents that had been requested.
If I have to be completely honest with you, Mr. Chair, until I was asked to get on this committee and to participate, I didn't even really fully understand it. When I started to go through these documents and started to understand this better, I honestly came to the conclusion myself. Being a member of Parliament, somebody who's “in the know”, so to speak, I came to the same conclusion. I said, “How is it possible that Mr. Poilievre is so obsessed with this information when it's pretty clear the parts that were redacted were completely irrelevant?”
I'll bring you back to what I said earlier, Mr. Chair. If this was somehow a document where people wanted to redact portions of it for the purpose of hiding stuff, within emails and within letters, within contracts, you would have seen portions of it redacted. You would have seen sentences of it redacted. You would have seen paragraphs. You would have seen words. You don't see any of that. It's all open and available, with the exception of telephone numbers and in some cases email addresses, although a lot of email addresses were shared.
Through you, Mr. Chair, I'll say that the opposition members are asking themselves, why are they going on and on about this? Why are they intent on filibustering this? Why are they pushing this as hard as they can? It's because the premise of what has happened here is wrong. They're trying to fabricate a scandal where it doesn't exist. I see a problem with that.
The more abusive problem, Mr. Chair, and the more egregious issue that I have, is how they're trying to implicate officers of Parliament and department officials in this. It's one thing for the opposition to go after the personal characteristics or personal relationships of a member of Parliament—most often the Prime Minister's. It's a completely different ball game when they start going after the people who are there to support the institution and who—theoretically, in the way our system is set up—don't care whether it's a Liberal government or a Conservative government. They don't care. They're there to execute their directives in a department, whether they come from cabinet, their minister or from Parliament, as it was in this case. Now we're trying to implicate them in all this. I have a huge issue with that.
We hear people talk about why the Liberals are holding this up and why the Liberals are spending...pushing on 12 hours. I'm doing it because I don't want to see people who can't protect themselves in these scenarios go down because they're considered collateral damage by Mr. Poilievre. I don't think it's appropriate. I don't think it's fair.
It's one thing when he and the Conservatives continually go after the Prime Minister. They had no problem with WE Charity being collateral damage, as long as it served their objective. They had no problem with that, but when it comes to the independent officers of Parliament, I have a serious issue with it.
Yes, I will hold this up as much as I can. I will put the brakes on this as much as I can, and I will go to the wall for these people because they deserve it. If the Conservatives—and, much to my dismay and unfortunate reality, the NDP and the Bloc—don't see that and are unwilling to see that they're allowing these people to become collateral damage in Mr. Poilievre's quest, then that's extremely unfortunate. I won't let it happen. We'll go through all this, and I'll highlight.... I will try to defend them as much as possible. They deserve that from us, as I've said in the past.
I go now to page 376, Mr. Chair. This continues on from that other document. This is schedule A of the project description. I've gone through 13 pages. There are 37 parts of that contract, plus the signatory page, where everybody would print and sign their name. Then we get into schedule A. Schedule A is the project description.
By the way, I should point out that absolutely nothing was redacted in that contract. I encourage all members to do their homework and look at the entire contract that was provided by the government House leader's office.
Then we get to schedule A. The first thing that was redacted is a telephone number, then an email address, then another telephone number and another email address. We have the names of the people who were the recipients of the project, which was WE Charity. Their names are right there. The only thing we don't get is their telephone number and their email address. Again, I can't understand why people would see the need to have that.
It talks about how WE Charity will administer cash awards and facilitate the creation of volunteer opportunities. All of this was open to Mr. Poilievre and his research team, back in his cave or his office or wherever it is, to go through in fine detail, to look at it and to make sure where the smoking gun is.
It's all here. It's all in this, Mr. Chair.
You get the activities of what they're supposed to be doing between June and September of 2020, and you get all the details, the bullet points of absolutely everything that's going on. Everything is in there. Then you get July to August; you get September to November, December to March 2021.
The reality is that as I read this and reflect on it, I think of the massive lost opportunities for students as a result of this. I think of the collateral damage that's been done by allowing WE, the charity, to take the heat of Mr. Poilievre's politically charged motives. I think it's extremely.... It's a detriment.
There are kids, there are students, who are worse off now because of this. When you finally get exactly what you're after, after I go through all of this and put it all in the record, you'll see that none of this was anything that was offensive and that should not have been redacted. It's all there, right in the actual document, for you to see.
Let us go on to the next page, the eligibility to participate in the WE-created volunteer opportunities. Here's the eligibility for the volunteer service opportunities, for the CSSG award; everything is in there, open, available and transparent for members to scrutinize. There's so much information in here.
Mr. Poilievre and the Conservatives—and the NDP, for that matter—could have taken the opportunity when they got this document to scrutinize the manner in which policy was being created to advance the interests and opportunities of young adults. There is so much policy in here that could have been the subject of the scrutiny, but it wasn't, and that's what we keep coming back to. The subject of the scrutiny was this: How do we make it look like they were trying to hide something so that we can better our own political agenda? Unfortunately, that's what happened.
We go further on for the disbursements of the Canada student service grant award. They go into the details of the lump sum, how people were going to get paid, the expected results. These are the outputs that were expected from this program. All of that is in there.
Forty thousand eligible volunteer service opportunities are gone, gone because Mr. Poilievre looked at WE as an opportunity to create political carnage upon other people. That's what he ended up getting out of this. Those opportunities are gone, and unfortunately, we see other members of other opposition parties jumping on board and following suit.
However, you had the opportunity to criticize the policy of this when you got all of this, to criticize what those outputs were going to be. The NDP had the opportunity to come here and say, “Well, hold on. Why is it only forty thousand eligible volunteer service opportunities? Shouldn't, for this kind of money, we be seeing sixty thousand eligible volunteer service opportunities? Why don't we do X instead of Y? Why don't we craft this policy so that it works like this instead of that way?” But no, they chose to do none of that. They chose not to engage in meaningful, productive dialogue that Canadians could benefit from. They chose nothing to that end, even though all the information was here.
I'm still going through this and I'm still on the schedules. I'm now at the signature line, where people were going to sign the acceptance of that schedule that's attached to the contract.
The next page I'm on here is page 394. This is Finance Canada's proposal from pages 394 to 401 of the PCO release. It discusses the implementation of the Canada student service grant in full and unredacted detail.
I am going to repeat that. It discusses the implementation of the CSSG in full and unredacted detail. This is the financial proposal. Can you guess at the only removal of information? ? I will put this out there. Can anybody at home guess what was left out from this information?
NDP
Peter Julian NDP New Westminster—Burnaby, BC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I would like to thank Alastair MacGregor, who has been doing a stellar job for the NDP. Mr. Chair, if you could catch me up on things, what have I missed over the last few hours?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter
You will have to look at the blues for that, Mr. Julian. It will probably be more accurate than my assessment would be, but Mr. Fraser has been going through some of the documents extensively and explaining what was redacted and what was not.
We'll go back to you Mr. Fraser.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
I have two things to say to that, Mr. Chair.
First of all, thank you, Mr. Julian. I usually leave it to my party to relieve me, but I appreciate the fact that you did so on my behalf.
Second, I just want to say that it is a massive compliment to be confused with Mr. Fraser, and I appreciate it, Mr. Chair. That was very nice of you.
Actually, Mr. Julian, for your benefit, I could start at the beginning again. Would you prefer that? No?
I'll just pick up where I left off, then. I was on page 380 and I was discussing the details in it and how the recipients and everybody was going to sign off on it.
Then I went to the next part. I thought it was very important. This was the financial proposal specifically on the implementation of the Canada student service program. I was putting it out there and I thought somebody was going to call me on a point of order for trying to turn this into a reality TV show and getting people to call in to answer my question.
I had put it out there that in the financial proposal, the implementation of the Canada student service grant goes into all the details. We get the overview, we get the proposal description, we get the costing, we get what to expect with the first 20,000 placement opportunities, we get the second cohort, and we get the initial processing and administrative capacity of the program.
We then go into the initial funding envelope of the grant, a total of $500 million. We go into the contingency fund of additional grants. We go into the program support costs of the program and the costing assumptions. We go into the implementation, again within those time periods from June to July and then over the summer and fall, and then to the results.
Then we hit the stakeholder communications and considerations. We go into lots of detail about the stakeholders who have been consulted and have contributed to this, and then we get to the end, and can we guess what is blacked out, Mr. Chair?
This is what I was getting at. Mr. Chair, I don't even want to make you guess, because I don't want to put you on the spot, but it was a telephone number.
That's right, Mr. Chair. I went through every section of this entire document—the financial proposal, the implementation of the Canada student service program and its financial impacts—and the only part that was redacted was the phone numbers of the executive director and the director.
Of course, this isn't what Mr. Poilievre chose to criticize. I'm sure he could have found something in here to attack the government on in terms of the policy it was attempting to create and how horrible and wrong it was. He could have done that, but that's a lot of work. That requires actually having to come up with ideas and thinking of different ways to do things and how to be better at things than what you're seeing other people trying to do.
It's a lot of work. It's a lot easier to just grab pieces of paper, portions of which have been blacked out—and you know full well why they've been blacked out—and grab your podium and your iPhone for your Twitter clip and start waving around the pages, saying, “Look at all the blackout that's going on here”, never heeding the fact that the entire document, which relates to the financial proposal and the implementation of the program, is 100%, with the exception of a mere 18 digits that represent two phone numbers, open and accessible and unredacted.
In the entire document, 18 digits have been redacted, representing two phone numbers. Somehow, Mr. Chair, Mr. Poilievre, joined by Mr. Julian, the Bloc and the rest of the Conservatives, are offended by that. I just don't understand it. It's great theatre, but it's completely misrepresentative of what's actually going on.
Let's get to an even more interesting document, Mr. Chair. I'm on page 402 now.
This is a very interesting document. I think my colleagues will also find it interesting. It is an email, and we're looking at page 404 of the PCO release in which there's an invitation to a meeting to discuss the WE contract. The redaction is a conference call ID log-in. It's probably not even active anymore. Those conference IDs are usually generated every time there's a new meeting, but somehow the government officials decided it was important to remove the conference ID, and it became an extremely offensive point to Mr. Poilievre and everybody else on the committee who opposes allowing the people who did that redaction to come and explain themselves.
Why don't they want to hear from the person who removed the conference ID to explain why they removed the ID? I can't understand why anybody would not be interested in getting the answer to that question, unless of course the motive is they weren't interested in it at all from the beginning, because it doesn't serve their purpose of political carnage, which is the word that Mr. Fragiskatos and I have been using. It doesn't serve that purpose, and that's clearly the only reason somebody would not want that to be public information, not want the public to be able to understand that information right from the people who actually did it. Therefore, I am going to go through it painstakingly and make sure their voices are heard as to why they chose to do that.
At page 405, we get into the PCO release of pages 417 to 419. This is a cabinet confidence document stamped “Limited Distribution”. It's what we call a memorandum to the Prime Minister, and it's seeking a decision regarding this program, the Canada student service grant and other matters. As is noted in the motion from the committee, matters related to this particular program were requested, and here they have been released. You have this document labelled “Secret—Limited Distribution, Confidence of the Queen's Privy Council”. I don't know about you guys, but this is the closest.... I'm sure Mr. Easter, who has been in cabinet, has seen a document like this before. I certainly haven't, but so has Mr. Poilievre. It may not mean a lot to him, but when I see this this document, a memorandum to the Prime Minister, I think is a pretty important document. I've got to be honest; I've never seen one of these before.
What is being redacted here? Let's have a look. The only items—and there are just a few points—that have been redacted are one and a half points. Everything else that's available for people to read are items unrelated to cabinet confidences. All that stuff was provided. The only stuff that was redacted was the stuff that was related to cabinet confidence.
This goes back to my earlier point. Mr. Poilievre didn't grab this sheet and ask why the cabinet confidence of the Queen's Privy Council and the summary had been so widely distributed or why he is getting all the information they're providing here. That never happened. He didn't do that because it didn't serve his purpose, since the only items that are blacked out here are those unrelated to the motion that was brought forward by this committee.
Then you go to the next pages, page 2, page 3. All of page 2 is available to read. You've got everything in there, from the decision of the Minister of Finance to the PCO comments on the issue. All of it's available. Not a single word is blacked out in this secret, limited distribution document, confidence of the Queen's Privy Council On page 2, it's all right there. This is the document the Prime Minister would have received.
On page 3 we go into this again, with bullet after bullet of the details right there. Then one item is blacked out toward the bottom.
Again, 97% of this, I'd say, with a quick glance, is totally available to be seen. As we've heard, the little bits that have been redacted were not germane to the motion and were not being asked for in the motion.
We then go to an interesting email here from the PCO. These are pages 426 to 427. It's an email from Ms. Roseanne MacKay at PCO to one of her colleagues, Alain Beaudoin. It is a cabinet meeting note for the Prime Minister, not unusual whatsoever. Does anybody out there want to guess what was redacted? I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but I think we're starting to notice a pattern here, Mr. Chair. What was redacted? It was a public servant's cellphone number. Again, clearly Mr. Poilievre has taken great offence to not being able to know that individual's cellphone number. Quite frankly, I don't think he needs to know. I don't think anybody else around this table generally believes, maybe with the exception of Mr. Poilievre, that they need to know.
The information, everything else in this email, is right here. This is from Roseanne McKay. She goes into detail. She says, “Please find attached the draft meeting management note for tomorrow's implementation call with the PMO.” They get into the details. You're really getting to see behind the curtain here. You're pulling it all back and you're seeing exactly what happened. You're seeing the emails flying back and forth. You're seeing the documents. I've gone through the contract. You're seeing the documents in terms of what was provided on the financial impact of this program. You're seeing all the emails. You've literally pulled back the curtain.
It just surprises me. I understand the motive of the Conservatives, but Mr. Julian has had the opportunity to look at this stuff too. He had it from the House leader's office as well and had the opportunity to see this, yet he still thinks that it's okay for parliamentary officials to be collateral damage in this, to have them strung up as the people who were responsible for breaching parliamentary privilege.
The whole notion that members of Parliament would be willing to let people go down for this is absolutely foreign to me. I can even understand, although I don't agree with it, that when it is somebody like a deputy minister, you can say, “Well, that deputy was really somewhere on the line between the politics and the non-partisan stuff.” You can take a position on that. I get it, because people do that all the time. People can make those judgment calls. I don't think it's the right thing to do, but I know from time to time people do that. I can understand not doing it, but I can also understand why people jump to doing it. What I just can't understand is when we start accusing officers of Parliament or legal counsel. What motivates that? I don't know. I guess it's some perceived political agenda that leads people to jump on it and start doing something like this. We're seeing a pattern here.
I hope if my discussion this evening serves any purpose, Mr. Chair, it's to show that we're seeing a pattern. The very first thing that you should get out of this pattern is that the vast majority of times, the things that were redacted were telephone numbers. Next to that, it was information that just wasn't asked for. Perhaps there's a way around this in the future; perhaps there isn't. I don't know.
The problem is that when these documents were originally prepared, obviously nobody knew that they were going to be asked to be supplied to committee, so everything was put into one document and things were compiled together. As a result, when this stuff was asked for and they started going through the documents, pulling out sections, just like a chapter doesn't always have to start on the beginning of the next page, neither does an issue.
That's what we're seeing here. We're seeing multiple issues being discussed. One issue was concluded and then, when the next issue was the Canada student service grant, they had to redact the part before it because it wasn't asked for.
The unfortunate thing about doing it that way is that it gave ammunition to Mr. Poilievre to start waving this piece of paper around, saying that they redacted all of this because they didn't want us to see it. In reality, it's just that the people didn't want to put in a page break when they went to the next topic. That's really what this is about. This is about the fact that in a lot of these documents, there just wasn't a page break. If there had been a page break on each issue, then each issue would have been on its own page and there would have been no redaction at all. That's what this comes down to.
Mr. Julian knows this. I believe Mr. Ste-Marie knows this. I believe the majority of my colleagues from the Conservative Party know this. For some reason it doesn't matter to them. For some reason, Mr. Chair, the integrity of the people who did that redaction because there wasn't a page break are now somehow getting strung up on this charge that they impeded the parliamentary privilege of members. I take great exception to that.
It comes down to the lack of a page break, basically. If there had been page breaks, there wouldn't have had to be the redactions we saw and Mr. Poilievre would not have his prop to wave around to everybody.
We go to pages 428 to 432 from the PCO. Again, we have a document with a conference ID redacted—it's probably not even functioning anymore—and items that are clearly not related to the Canada student service grant. These items were redacted by the good folks at the public service.
I find it really interesting that in most cases, if not all, it still shows the title. We saw this routinely throughout this document, Mr. Chair. In this case, I'm on page 428. It says the status of implementation of the Canada emergency wage subsidy. That's all there. It has the Canada emergency response benefit, or CERB. One part in there is not relevant, so it's been redacted. We're still seeing all the details of the other stuff. They're still giving us the titles, so that we know exactly what it is, where and why they were redacting stuff and how stuff was not relevant.
This document goes on and on. On pages 429 and 430, there is a lot of information about the Canada summer jobs program and an implementation update on that. The comments are available for that. The Canada emergency commercial rent assistance is in there as well. We get to the Canada emergency account that was set up for businesses. We have old age security, the guaranteed income supplement top-up and the regional relief and recovery fund.
The document goes on to page 432. Then, guess what? We have another email here, on pages 433 to 434. We see another release from the PCO. Mr. Chair, do you want to guess what's been redacted again? It's nine digits: a nine-digit phone number from an individual who sent an email. That's it.
Again, Mr. Poilievre has a fascination with public servants' phone numbers, and that's clearly becoming apparent to us; nonetheless, that's all that's been redacted, and you can see that it is so
Another email here from July 28 regarding the WE contract, saying “please find the email below”, is from Heather Moriarty in social development policy. It goes on to give the details in the email correspondence back-and-forth up to page 434.
We get to page 435 and the redaction below. This one again appears to be only an email address. It's an email address of an individual who is shown on the “cc” line, the carbon copy line. Mr. Chair, that's the only thing that's been redacted.
It goes into the details of an email from Marc Kielburger. His email says:
Hi ——,
Thank you for your time and your call.
As we shared in our call, we are feeling confident for launch.
1. We currently have 10,000 WE placements which are ready.
2. If needed, we can have 15,000 WE placements which could be ready for launch.
It goes into all the details. Everything is in here. The only item that has been redacted is again the nine-digit phone number.
On page 458, we're again looking at an email exchange among public servants who are involved in the Canada student service grant file. The content again is all visible. The redaction is of the cellphone number of a public servant. That's it.
Conservative
Liberal
