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?