Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to my colleague, Ms. Dzerowicz, for her intervention. The passion she showed towards the end of that is truly reflective of the calibre of MP that she is and what she brings to the table here. I wholeheartedly see that she wants a solution and a way through this. That is going to be a compromise that everybody is going to be able to appreciate and value.
I'll go back to Mr. Ste-Marie's comments. He said that this was a waste of time. Obviously, filibusters are inherently intended to do that to make a point. There is, perhaps, a bit of confusion as to why we're going down that road. The illusion that Mr. Poilievre and other Conservatives would like to paint is that there's something to hide. That couldn't be further from the truth.
I am very adamant about this one particular subamendment specifically because I'm concerned about the manner in which public officials are being treated. I want them to have a voice. I want to allow them to express themselves before we get to a point of determining whether or not they breached parliamentary privileges by the manner in which they provided information. I'm not talking about political staffers. I'm talking about the officials who contributed to the redactions that we see in the documents.
I'm getting a sense, Mr. Chair, that I'm not going to get anywhere with this. It hasn't been obvious to me that there's any interest from members other than Liberals at this time to support this amendment.
I'm led to the the conclusion that it's going to be very difficult for these public officials to be able to defend themselves. I think it's extremely important that they have the opportunity to do that. If we're not going to allow them the opportunity to defend themselves, Mr. Chair, then I think it's incumbent upon me to go to the wall on this one, as Mr. MacGregor phrased it. It's incumbent upon us—and I certainly take the challenge—to make sure that they are properly represented and that their voices can be heard. I do not want officials to go down as the reason that parliamentary privilege was broken when perhaps that wasn't the case. We really won't know and be able to cast the best judgment possible unless we give them the opportunity to speak for themselves.
Since members don't want to afford that opportunity, I'm going to try to defend them to the best of my own ability.
With that, I would refer everybody to the PCO redactions that were submitted. I'd like to go through those to explicitly highlight where redactions were made so that the general public can know and it can be put on the record.
There are 151 pages in this document. I'll try to go through it as thoroughly as possible to provide as much detail as possible, so that their voices can be heard through this process of trying to make sure that what they did to the documents is understood.
If we start on page 49, we see the first perfect example. We are looking here at a PCO document. A number of programs are listed. I wish I could share my screen and go through this with everybody. What we have here is an Excel-style table. There are a number of programs here that completely do not relate to the Canada student service grant program that was the subject of this motion.
I'll read off the ones that were blacked out, the ones that were redacted. This was one of those perfect pages that Mr. Poilievre held up and shook while he stood there at the podium saying that it had all been blacked out. Well, let's talk about what was actually blacked out.
We have the youth employment and skills strategy, which wasn't relevant to this, the student work placement program, the student learning program, Canada Service Corps, other financial supports, the Canada student loans program, the doubling of the Canada student grant and the Canada student benefit. None of those were visible, because they were not the subject of the motion from this committee.
However, among the ones that were visible and were completely subject to this committee's motion was the Canada student grant, where it specifically talks about post-secondary students under 30 enrolled in spring, summer or fall courses who significantly contribute to COVID-19 efforts through voluntary service, and then it goes on to talk about the $900 million to be set aside and the various questions that needed to be addressed in relation to that.
There was also the WE social entrepreneurship initiative, which was relevant and which is visible in the document. There's the $12 million there, and again that is completely visible on that document.
The next part that came from the PCO that I think is germane and relevant to discuss is pages 78 to 79 of that document. It is from Mr. Kielburger to Ms. Fox at PCO, yet the only redaction present in this whole email, Mr. Chair, is the private citizen's email address. That's the email address of Mr. Kielburger's assistant. This is private information and has no relevance to the process. Therefore, there was nothing that was necessary to be—