I don't think there are any public servants who are defending this redaction. These were political redactions.
I know it's true that in the previous government we deferred to public servants and allowed them to make decisions on what was appropriate and what was not because we respected public servants. That has clearly not happened here in this case. That is why I stand by my earlier quote from 2014, because quite accurately that was the practice back then. We deferred to public servants on these matters. At present, there's no doubt that there's been political interference at the highest level to black out documents that should be made public.
Mr. Chair, we as a committee asked for the law clerk to have the ability to determine what should be redacted and what should be public. The government allowed its political leaders, probably ministers, to make those decisions for this particular document. If all we're talking about in these documents is a bunch of phone numbers, then give it over to the law clerk. I can be sure the law clerk is not going to do prank calls on these public servants. I don't think you can imagine our law clerk is going to be up at two in the morning prank-calling all kinds of public servants in the middle of the night for the fun of it. I think he can be counted on not to publish private phone numbers on the Internet.
I think the government and its members know that these are not phone numbers that were redacted. In some cases, it's two or three pages of black ink. That's one hell of a long phone number. This must not be just an international call, or even interplanetary call, but an intergalactic call to the other end of the universe for a phone number that goes that long.
We don't have to take my word for it that phone numbers are not typically three or four pages long. Just give it to the law clerk. If all these pages upon pages upon pages of black ink are merely covering up people's phone numbers to protect them from prank calls, then I'm sure the law clerk can be counted on to ensure those numbers do not become public.
That's all we're asking for. Hand the documents over to the law clerk. Let the legal team that works for the House of Commons, in whom we all have confidence and who report through the clerk to the Speaker, who is a Liberal, do that work on behalf of all of us. The law clerk is our lawyer, the lawyer for all of us collectively in Parliament. He can be counted on to do it. He took the extraordinary step to write a letter, and he made it public, saying he didn't get the unredacted documents that Parliament asked for. It's that simple. To say that this is all public servants just quietly doing their work and politicians impugning them, we know that's nonsense. We know that the public servant who works for us in a legal capacity, the parliamentary law clerk, has said he does not have the documents he should have based on a motion passed at this committee. All we're asking for is that those documents be handed over.
If tonight the government were to send over those documents and we were to get a confirmation from the law clerk that he has received them, I would be prepared at that moment and under that condition to put my point of privilege aside, to be revisited only after the clerk confirmed that he got what the committee asked for.
There is a way out here for the government. They can hand those documents unredacted over to the law clerk tonight, and then we won't have to talk about this anymore. We can get on to what I want to talk about, which is the pre-budget consultations. For God's sake, our economy is a total disaster right now. We have the worst deficit in the G20 and the worst unemployment in the G7. Let's get to work on that, for God's sake. We don't need to be rambling on in circles, as the government members are doing. Let's solve this right now. Hand over the documents with no black ink. Let the law clerk do his work. He'll come back to us and say whether he got what he was looking for. He'll make sure that nobody's phone number is released, and then we can all get to the bottom of this scandal.
Does that sound fair?