It's true.
Anyway, Mr. Chair, thank you.
I'm going to repeat a little of what Mr. Gerretsen had mentioned. I think if you step back and look at what Mr. Poilievre's motion is about, and really from what I've heard from Mr. Julian, and we haven't heard a lot from Mr. Ste-Marie but my understanding is that he has this worry as well, if there is a belief that the redactions within the 5,600-page WE documents that were released towards the end of August were made because the Liberal government was deliberately trying to hide something, then this motion gets directly to the point.
The other thing I've been hearing, I've been hearing from Ms. Jansen and I've been hearing from Mr. Julian today, is that we should get going on stuff that matters to Canadians.
If we're trying to get to that, and if we need as a government to be able to prove that civil servants independently redacted this, and if we could actually bring them to committee, have them respond directly to the committee, directly provide the documents relevant to the committee, actually ask those questions ourselves in the public light, then I think we should be able to clear this up and move on to the business of why it is that we exist right now.
Let's ignore the fact for a moment, because we forget that the documents were just one part of the whole looking into the concerns around the selection of WE to run the CSSG, and recall that we had almost two full months of meetings on this committee, never mind the other committees and never mind that the Ethics Commissioner is looking at it, as well as the Auditor General. We have already proven, and we can go through all the people who want to remind themselves of this, whether they are new members or old members, or new or old members of this committee, that there are actually minutes that show this wasn't corruption. There was no misuse of funds. WE was independently selected by civil servants. We didn't do a sole-sourced contract. We selected a contribution agreement for very deliberate reasons, with clear parameters, and we absolutely did this for students.
I would say to you that this is an amazing opportunity. What this motion basically says, and I hope people have had a chance to look at it at this point, is that it's suspending the original motion that Mr. Poilievre put aside and the amendment, both of those, in order for us to be able to provide the two sets of documents we've been talking about today, as well as to bring forward the relevant civil servants who are in charge of doing the redactions. That would allow the committee to hear directly from them. This would all be done in the public context.
If for some reason the opposition is really unhappy with what they are hearing or they don't think it's enough, we can come back and we can make a decision to come back to the original motion of Mr. Poilievre as well as the amendment, although I would hope that we would be able to get past this, because as my colleague Mr. Gerretsen had indicated, then we will see this is just a game and this is just a way of our opposition members being able to say, “Well, you know what? We just want in some way to make the Liberals look bad.”
Right now, we are in an unprecedented pandemic. Canadians are asking us to be our best selves. Canadians are asking us to be the government they need us to be at this moment. That means we have to get past this partisan stuff. We have to get past these games, if only for the moment, if only for this year, because we have some really important work to do.
If this is what it's going to take, that we have to bring the officials who did the redactions, if we have to spend a meeting or two on discussing it, then let's move forward and do it so we can get on as fast as possible to the important work we have ahead, and to rebuilding our economy and to supporting Canadians through this most unprecedented pandemic.