Evidence of meeting #1 for Finance in the 43rd Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was chair.
A recording is available from Parliament.
9:30 p.m.
NDP
Peter Julian NDP New Westminster—Burnaby, BC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I would like to thank Alastair MacGregor, who has been doing a stellar job for the NDP. Mr. Chair, if you could catch me up on things, what have I missed over the last few hours?
9:30 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter
You will have to look at the blues for that, Mr. Julian. It will probably be more accurate than my assessment would be, but Mr. Fraser has been going through some of the documents extensively and explaining what was redacted and what was not.
We'll go back to you Mr. Fraser.
9:35 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
I have two things to say to that, Mr. Chair.
First of all, thank you, Mr. Julian. I usually leave it to my party to relieve me, but I appreciate the fact that you did so on my behalf.
Second, I just want to say that it is a massive compliment to be confused with Mr. Fraser, and I appreciate it, Mr. Chair. That was very nice of you.
Actually, Mr. Julian, for your benefit, I could start at the beginning again. Would you prefer that? No?
I'll just pick up where I left off, then. I was on page 380 and I was discussing the details in it and how the recipients and everybody was going to sign off on it.
Then I went to the next part. I thought it was very important. This was the financial proposal specifically on the implementation of the Canada student service program. I was putting it out there and I thought somebody was going to call me on a point of order for trying to turn this into a reality TV show and getting people to call in to answer my question.
I had put it out there that in the financial proposal, the implementation of the Canada student service grant goes into all the details. We get the overview, we get the proposal description, we get the costing, we get what to expect with the first 20,000 placement opportunities, we get the second cohort, and we get the initial processing and administrative capacity of the program.
We then go into the initial funding envelope of the grant, a total of $500 million. We go into the contingency fund of additional grants. We go into the program support costs of the program and the costing assumptions. We go into the implementation, again within those time periods from June to July and then over the summer and fall, and then to the results.
Then we hit the stakeholder communications and considerations. We go into lots of detail about the stakeholders who have been consulted and have contributed to this, and then we get to the end, and can we guess what is blacked out, Mr. Chair?
This is what I was getting at. Mr. Chair, I don't even want to make you guess, because I don't want to put you on the spot, but it was a telephone number.
That's right, Mr. Chair. I went through every section of this entire document—the financial proposal, the implementation of the Canada student service program and its financial impacts—and the only part that was redacted was the phone numbers of the executive director and the director.
Of course, this isn't what Mr. Poilievre chose to criticize. I'm sure he could have found something in here to attack the government on in terms of the policy it was attempting to create and how horrible and wrong it was. He could have done that, but that's a lot of work. That requires actually having to come up with ideas and thinking of different ways to do things and how to be better at things than what you're seeing other people trying to do.
It's a lot of work. It's a lot easier to just grab pieces of paper, portions of which have been blacked out—and you know full well why they've been blacked out—and grab your podium and your iPhone for your Twitter clip and start waving around the pages, saying, “Look at all the blackout that's going on here”, never heeding the fact that the entire document, which relates to the financial proposal and the implementation of the program, is 100%, with the exception of a mere 18 digits that represent two phone numbers, open and accessible and unredacted.
In the entire document, 18 digits have been redacted, representing two phone numbers. Somehow, Mr. Chair, Mr. Poilievre, joined by Mr. Julian, the Bloc and the rest of the Conservatives, are offended by that. I just don't understand it. It's great theatre, but it's completely misrepresentative of what's actually going on.
Let's get to an even more interesting document, Mr. Chair. I'm on page 402 now.
This is a very interesting document. I think my colleagues will also find it interesting. It is an email, and we're looking at page 404 of the PCO release in which there's an invitation to a meeting to discuss the WE contract. The redaction is a conference call ID log-in. It's probably not even active anymore. Those conference IDs are usually generated every time there's a new meeting, but somehow the government officials decided it was important to remove the conference ID, and it became an extremely offensive point to Mr. Poilievre and everybody else on the committee who opposes allowing the people who did that redaction to come and explain themselves.
Why don't they want to hear from the person who removed the conference ID to explain why they removed the ID? I can't understand why anybody would not be interested in getting the answer to that question, unless of course the motive is they weren't interested in it at all from the beginning, because it doesn't serve their purpose of political carnage, which is the word that Mr. Fragiskatos and I have been using. It doesn't serve that purpose, and that's clearly the only reason somebody would not want that to be public information, not want the public to be able to understand that information right from the people who actually did it. Therefore, I am going to go through it painstakingly and make sure their voices are heard as to why they chose to do that.
At page 405, we get into the PCO release of pages 417 to 419. This is a cabinet confidence document stamped “Limited Distribution”. It's what we call a memorandum to the Prime Minister, and it's seeking a decision regarding this program, the Canada student service grant and other matters. As is noted in the motion from the committee, matters related to this particular program were requested, and here they have been released. You have this document labelled “Secret—Limited Distribution, Confidence of the Queen's Privy Council”. I don't know about you guys, but this is the closest.... I'm sure Mr. Easter, who has been in cabinet, has seen a document like this before. I certainly haven't, but so has Mr. Poilievre. It may not mean a lot to him, but when I see this this document, a memorandum to the Prime Minister, I think is a pretty important document. I've got to be honest; I've never seen one of these before.
What is being redacted here? Let's have a look. The only items—and there are just a few points—that have been redacted are one and a half points. Everything else that's available for people to read are items unrelated to cabinet confidences. All that stuff was provided. The only stuff that was redacted was the stuff that was related to cabinet confidence.
This goes back to my earlier point. Mr. Poilievre didn't grab this sheet and ask why the cabinet confidence of the Queen's Privy Council and the summary had been so widely distributed or why he is getting all the information they're providing here. That never happened. He didn't do that because it didn't serve his purpose, since the only items that are blacked out here are those unrelated to the motion that was brought forward by this committee.
Then you go to the next pages, page 2, page 3. All of page 2 is available to read. You've got everything in there, from the decision of the Minister of Finance to the PCO comments on the issue. All of it's available. Not a single word is blacked out in this secret, limited distribution document, confidence of the Queen's Privy Council On page 2, it's all right there. This is the document the Prime Minister would have received.
On page 3 we go into this again, with bullet after bullet of the details right there. Then one item is blacked out toward the bottom.
Again, 97% of this, I'd say, with a quick glance, is totally available to be seen. As we've heard, the little bits that have been redacted were not germane to the motion and were not being asked for in the motion.
We then go to an interesting email here from the PCO. These are pages 426 to 427. It's an email from Ms. Roseanne MacKay at PCO to one of her colleagues, Alain Beaudoin. It is a cabinet meeting note for the Prime Minister, not unusual whatsoever. Does anybody out there want to guess what was redacted? I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but I think we're starting to notice a pattern here, Mr. Chair. What was redacted? It was a public servant's cellphone number. Again, clearly Mr. Poilievre has taken great offence to not being able to know that individual's cellphone number. Quite frankly, I don't think he needs to know. I don't think anybody else around this table generally believes, maybe with the exception of Mr. Poilievre, that they need to know.
The information, everything else in this email, is right here. This is from Roseanne McKay. She goes into detail. She says, “Please find attached the draft meeting management note for tomorrow's implementation call with the PMO.” They get into the details. You're really getting to see behind the curtain here. You're pulling it all back and you're seeing exactly what happened. You're seeing the emails flying back and forth. You're seeing the documents. I've gone through the contract. You're seeing the documents in terms of what was provided on the financial impact of this program. You're seeing all the emails. You've literally pulled back the curtain.
It just surprises me. I understand the motive of the Conservatives, but Mr. Julian has had the opportunity to look at this stuff too. He had it from the House leader's office as well and had the opportunity to see this, yet he still thinks that it's okay for parliamentary officials to be collateral damage in this, to have them strung up as the people who were responsible for breaching parliamentary privilege.
The whole notion that members of Parliament would be willing to let people go down for this is absolutely foreign to me. I can even understand, although I don't agree with it, that when it is somebody like a deputy minister, you can say, “Well, that deputy was really somewhere on the line between the politics and the non-partisan stuff.” You can take a position on that. I get it, because people do that all the time. People can make those judgment calls. I don't think it's the right thing to do, but I know from time to time people do that. I can understand not doing it, but I can also understand why people jump to doing it. What I just can't understand is when we start accusing officers of Parliament or legal counsel. What motivates that? I don't know. I guess it's some perceived political agenda that leads people to jump on it and start doing something like this. We're seeing a pattern here.
I hope if my discussion this evening serves any purpose, Mr. Chair, it's to show that we're seeing a pattern. The very first thing that you should get out of this pattern is that the vast majority of times, the things that were redacted were telephone numbers. Next to that, it was information that just wasn't asked for. Perhaps there's a way around this in the future; perhaps there isn't. I don't know.
The problem is that when these documents were originally prepared, obviously nobody knew that they were going to be asked to be supplied to committee, so everything was put into one document and things were compiled together. As a result, when this stuff was asked for and they started going through the documents, pulling out sections, just like a chapter doesn't always have to start on the beginning of the next page, neither does an issue.
That's what we're seeing here. We're seeing multiple issues being discussed. One issue was concluded and then, when the next issue was the Canada student service grant, they had to redact the part before it because it wasn't asked for.
The unfortunate thing about doing it that way is that it gave ammunition to Mr. Poilievre to start waving this piece of paper around, saying that they redacted all of this because they didn't want us to see it. In reality, it's just that the people didn't want to put in a page break when they went to the next topic. That's really what this is about. This is about the fact that in a lot of these documents, there just wasn't a page break. If there had been a page break on each issue, then each issue would have been on its own page and there would have been no redaction at all. That's what this comes down to.
Mr. Julian knows this. I believe Mr. Ste-Marie knows this. I believe the majority of my colleagues from the Conservative Party know this. For some reason it doesn't matter to them. For some reason, Mr. Chair, the integrity of the people who did that redaction because there wasn't a page break are now somehow getting strung up on this charge that they impeded the parliamentary privilege of members. I take great exception to that.
It comes down to the lack of a page break, basically. If there had been page breaks, there wouldn't have had to be the redactions we saw and Mr. Poilievre would not have his prop to wave around to everybody.
We go to pages 428 to 432 from the PCO. Again, we have a document with a conference ID redacted—it's probably not even functioning anymore—and items that are clearly not related to the Canada student service grant. These items were redacted by the good folks at the public service.
I find it really interesting that in most cases, if not all, it still shows the title. We saw this routinely throughout this document, Mr. Chair. In this case, I'm on page 428. It says the status of implementation of the Canada emergency wage subsidy. That's all there. It has the Canada emergency response benefit, or CERB. One part in there is not relevant, so it's been redacted. We're still seeing all the details of the other stuff. They're still giving us the titles, so that we know exactly what it is, where and why they were redacting stuff and how stuff was not relevant.
This document goes on and on. On pages 429 and 430, there is a lot of information about the Canada summer jobs program and an implementation update on that. The comments are available for that. The Canada emergency commercial rent assistance is in there as well. We get to the Canada emergency account that was set up for businesses. We have old age security, the guaranteed income supplement top-up and the regional relief and recovery fund.
The document goes on to page 432. Then, guess what? We have another email here, on pages 433 to 434. We see another release from the PCO. Mr. Chair, do you want to guess what's been redacted again? It's nine digits: a nine-digit phone number from an individual who sent an email. That's it.
Again, Mr. Poilievre has a fascination with public servants' phone numbers, and that's clearly becoming apparent to us; nonetheless, that's all that's been redacted, and you can see that it is so
Another email here from July 28 regarding the WE contract, saying “please find the email below”, is from Heather Moriarty in social development policy. It goes on to give the details in the email correspondence back-and-forth up to page 434.
We get to page 435 and the redaction below. This one again appears to be only an email address. It's an email address of an individual who is shown on the “cc” line, the carbon copy line. Mr. Chair, that's the only thing that's been redacted.
It goes into the details of an email from Marc Kielburger. His email says:
Hi ——,
Thank you for your time and your call.
As we shared in our call, we are feeling confident for launch.
1. We currently have 10,000 WE placements which are ready.
2. If needed, we can have 15,000 WE placements which could be ready for launch.
It goes into all the details. Everything is in here. The only item that has been redacted is again the nine-digit phone number.
On page 458, we're again looking at an email exchange among public servants who are involved in the Canada student service grant file. The content again is all visible. The redaction is of the cellphone number of a public servant. That's it.
9:55 p.m.
Conservative
9:55 p.m.
Liberal
9:55 p.m.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON
The member is suggesting that all that's being redacted here is phone numbers and email addresses—
9:55 p.m.
Liberal
9:55 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Mr. Chair, I still have a lot to say. This is not a point of order.
9:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter
I'll hear Mr. Poilievre out for a minute to see whether it is a point of order.
Go ahead, Mr. Poilievre.
9:55 p.m.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON
I was just going to say that under the terms of the previous motion, which was adopted in accordance with the Standing Orders, the documents were to be turned over to the Law Clerk of the House of Commons. If the redactions are simply phone numbers and email addresses, then the Law Clerk can confirm that to be true or untrue and make sure that nothing is released other than that which is permitted according to the original motion.
If it's just phone numbers and email addresses, then the government can hand it over unredacted—
9:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Wayne Easter
I don't think it is a point of order; it's a matter of debate.
I will go back to Mr. Gerretsen, who is staying pretty relevant to the motion that's on the floor.
Go ahead.
9:55 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Although I would agree that it was not a point of order, I want to thank you, Mr. Poilievre, for bringing up that very important point because that is what this amendment is about.
It's about letting them confirm that. It's about inviting them to this committee to allow them the opportunity to confirm that, so, yes, you are right. You didn't have a point of order, but you raised an incredibly good point, which—
10 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Yes, congratulations. We are starting to get somewhere now, Mr. Poilievre, and it's great.
That's what this amendment is about. It's saying, “Let's invite them here so that they can confirm that.”
10 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
I'm going through detail. I know, Mr. Poilievre, that you have been following this.
10 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
Despite the fact that Mr. Poilievre has been changing backgrounds, I know he has been following along with this.
10 p.m.
Liberal
Mark Gerretsen Liberal Kingston and the Islands, ON
He will know, Mr. Chair, that I am going meticulously through these details because where he does not see it as being his responsibility to protect the great public servants that we have, I am going to defend their case—
