I also want to say a huge thanks to you, Mr. Chair, and to everyone, for the 10-minute break.
I too am going to go through a fairly detailed speech. It's not quite as long as my colleague Mr. Fragiskatos's, but I can assure you, Mr. Chair, it is related to the subamendment. It highlights the issues that we have to look at in the reconciliation of any discrepancies, and why it's important for us to have analysis from the clerk to compare the two versions we've been talking about.
I'm going to continue from where my colleague Mr. Fraser left off by providing a detailed examination of the package of the documents provided by ESDC. The transmittal letters read into the record by Mr. Fraser provide us with some good context. I'm going to be providing a few more examples of why it was very good context. I'm going to use the page numbers that were stamped on the documents, as they are the only indicators I have from the packages provided to the committee today. Again, this is all related to the ESDC documents. I'm going to start with pages 159 and 161.
At the very top right of the page a designation reads “secret”, and then there's another designation that reads “confidence of the Queen's Privy Council”. These are key designations that one would find in a document with cabinet confidences. Confidences of the Queen's Privy Council are defined in the following way:
Cabinet ministers are collectively responsible for all actions taken by the Cabinet and must publicly support all Cabinet decisions. In order to reach final decisions, ministers must be able to express their views freely during the discussions held in Cabinet. To allow the exchange of views to be disclosed publicly would result in the erosion of the collective responsibility of ministers. As a result, the collective decision-making process has traditionally been protected by the rule of confidentiality, which upholds the principle of collective responsibility and enables ministers to engage in full and frank discussions necessary for the effective functioning of a Cabinet system.
The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized that cabinet confidentiality is essential to good government. In the decision Babcock v. Canada, 2002, SCC 57, at paragraph 18 the court explained the reasons for this: The process of democratic governance works best when Cabinet members charged with government policy and decision-making are free to express themselves around the Cabinet table unreservedly.
To preserve this rule of confidentiality, subsection 70(1) of the Privacy Act—and from hereon in I'm going be referring to the Privacy Act as “the act”—provides:This Act does not apply to confidences of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada.
For convenience, in the following, “material confidences” will be used to refer to confidences of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada. Matters classified as secret are considered secret because their release would cause serious injury to the national interest, yet here we see that one of those essential confidences was redacted with only a conference call ID redacted. Clearly, the government and public service have been proactive in releasing as much information as possible, even information that's typically closely held and privileged to allow for the proper and effective management of government.
Maybe I'll pause for one second. I think that sometimes when we us lingo for who's doing the redacting—I know it's been mentioned a few times, but it's always been said that you have to repeat things six or seven times for it to stick in someone's mind—the redactions were done by our independent civil servants and under very strict rules. These are rules that have been followed for years. They were not new rules that were created for these documents. I want to remind all Canadians who might listening that this was done by independent civil servants to decide what should be redacted, what should not be included.
I'll provide some more information about what we continue to.... I want to highlight a few more redactions.
If we look to pages 414 to 429, you will see an email between relevant public servants responsible for the CSSG program. For those who have forgotten, CSSG is the Canada student service grant program, which WE had originally been awarded to deliver by ESDC. The only redactions we see here are of personal information and unrelated cabinet confidences, which were permitted under the FINA motion. However, our government was forthright. All information as it relates to the CSSG is here in plain sight. The entirely blacked-out pages that Mr. Poilievre has referenced several times are nowhere to be found. I want to make sure I point that out.
On pages 544 to 545, if we look at those pages of the ESDC release, we once again see redacted phone numbers. The only redactions we have found on these particular pages is in reference to a conference call ID.
On page 621, again we show redactions of conference call access information, which, Mr. Chair, is very reasonable. These are active conference call lines, likely used by by Ms. Wernick or the minister's staff. There's no reason that the public should have access to it, for any reason. It is a security issue.
Chair, if we look at pages 622 to 628 of the ESDC release—and if you had it in front of you, you would see on the top right corner that this document is marked “secret”. For those Canadians who are following from home, Treasury Board Secretariat and our security services count any information that could cause serious injury to the national interest as secret information. I'm sure Canadians can understand that cabinet confidences are information critical to the national interest and government decision-making. They are, rightly, never disclosed lightly, yet here in this document we have a prime example of the level of transparency our government went to in order to ensure that documents related to CSSG were released to parliamentarians.
Where we do see redactions in these secret cabinet confidence documents, they are for information unrelated to our motion, and which are clearly in the critical national interest and therefore should remain protected. Our non-partisan public service went about ensuring that the national interest was respected.
We turn to pages 631 to 638. As mentioned earlier on, Mr. Chair, there are reasons why we're marking many of our documents secret or at a higher classification and why they're so closely guarded. I want to provide an example where the non-partisan public service did make some redactions.
Here we are looking at pages 631 to 638 of this ESDC release. Colleagues will note that it's only one page. This is due to the fact that the public service redacted the section due to relevance and to protect cabinet confidences, which is in our national interest.
I know, Mr. Chair, that my opposition colleagues sometimes will think that we have a negative intent when those redactions are done by our independent civil servants. I do think they've been very responsible. I think they've done their best to try to disclose as much information while honouring secret or non-disclosable information, as per how I've defined it earlier on when I started the presentation.
If we turn to pages 888 to 889, the only thing that's redacted here is a private cellphone number of public servant.
Again, if we turn to pages 958 to 966, it looks to be a cabinet document to discuss the implementation of the CSSG. Again, these are not the types of documents that, on average, are made public. In respect of the motion we have, it is almost entirely unredacted, with unrelated personal information and cabinet confidences removed.
If we turn to pages 975 to 979 from the ESDC release, we see minimal redactions. Only personal information was removed; 95% of all these pages are visible for anyone to read.
On pages 1056 to 1057, here we have an email from Ms. Wernick to several other officials. Clearly, all items are related to CSSG. They are unredacted. They're visible. At the time our government was busy delivering a number of programs to help Canadians through the pandemic. These redactions are likely discussions around those programs.
If you were able to turn to this and look at pages 1092 to 1098, this is an example of what a complete page redaction looks like.
As you could see from some of my previous examples, complete page removals like this are rare and are directly related to cabinet confidences, which, as the original FINA motion stated, were expressly excluded. Again, these pages were removed by the professional non-partisan public service, who were carrying out their duty to protect cabinet confidences.
Here's also an interesting redaction, Mr. Chair. Somewhere between pages 1262 and 1275 of the ESDC release, we see that the non-partisan public service has redacted a document password. Of course, we do that for security reasons, and for very valid reasons.
On pages 1784 to 1788, you'll see that there is communication between Ms. Wernick and several department officials, with minimal sections removed due to cabinet confidence, which is, again, expressly permitted under the FINA motion.
When we look to pages 1959 to 1960, we're looking at an email from Ms. Wernick to Ms. Shannon at PCO. We see that over 95% of the email is visible, with one minor redaction due to the cabinet confidence. As we've mentioned, that is completely allowable.
Let me see if I can give you a few more examples, and then I want to wrap up with a couple of comments.
On pages 2176 to 2181, we're looking at an email from the deputy minister at ESDC. We see a majority of the information is included as it relates to CSSG, but again, any cabinet confidence or private information is removed.
If we look at page 2191, we see it's an email from Minister Qualtrough to her deputy minister. We see there's no redaction other than the minister's private email address. Typically these types of correspondence are kept in confidence, but it was waived as it relates to CSSG and is here for all of us to see.
I think we can see from these examples that our public service did its very best to try to put out as much information as possible, as long as we were honouring anything that might be deemed a cabinet confidence or part of cabinet discussions, as long as we were honouring any secret information like telephone numbers or any personal details that might be completely irrelevant to the CSSG contract, to the CSSG program and to WE being selected to deliver the CSSG contract.
I'm trying to see if there is anything else that's relevant, other than telephone numbers being redacted and other bits of information. Largely, I have about another 10 pages where I could say, well, for the most part we haven't redacted the information. We've done our very best to try to provide information, or the civil servants tried to make sure that as much information was going out...as per the instructions of the July 7 motion.
I'm going to end with probably one more comment, Mr. Chair. One thing that I think we might have forgotten is that when our Prime Minister made the announcement that there was going to be a prorogation of government, I think he—