This is on my amendment, Mr. Chair.
I put this forward as another attempt. This is my third attempt to try to provide some clarity around what's expected and what's going to happen. I think that the committee should get to hear from public servants who did the redactions and the law clerk and parliamentary counsel. What the opposition is doing—again this is in my opinion, and I don't want to get criticized for attacking anybody personally, because that's certainly not what I'm doing—is finding officials to have breached privileges of Parliament without even providing them the due process of explaining themselves. The due process, I believe, Mr. Chair, is extremely important.
If after the committee has heard from the witnesses it is still not satisfied, then it can take whatever actions are deemed necessary. But we need to afford that due process, Mr. Chair. I think that in light of allowing that due process to occur, we should pass this motion to invite those officials. If the opposition is genuinely and truly interested in getting information in front of them and getting down to the bottom of this, why they wouldn't support bringing those officials to the committee to explain the process for themselves is a mystery to me.
If you want to talk about transparency and clarity and the need for accountability, what could be more accountable than having these individuals come to committee and address the issue and explain this?
You remember that earlier, Mr. Chair, I talked about what I perceived as the motivation. It wasn't about getting the information as much as it was about trying to sensationalize blacked out documents. You recall, Mr. Chair, that I spoke to that. There's a very easy way to prove me wrong, which is to support this motion, to let the individuals come forward, to let them speak and to let their voices be heard on this. If you don't do that, then you're leaving the question of, well, why wouldn't you want to do that? That's how I come to the conclusion that you don't want to do it, because it might make this argument of some massive conspiracy that some have been trying to build up over the last several months fall completely flat. So if people vote against this and they're basically saying, no, we don't want these officials to come forward and explain the process, in my opinion what you're basically doing is saying, no, we don't want the details; we don't want the facts; those don't matter. We want the sensational part of Mr. Poilievre waving around blacked out papers that he probably just made by taking a square and painting it black and hitting print and using that as his prop.