Certainly, and perhaps I'll address that point before I'm done as well.
Where I was going with this point is that if we were to adopt the main motion or the amendment without the subamendment, we would not only be denying the opportunity for the civil service to explain why the redactions were made, but we would also specifically be excluding from evidence the explanation it had already given to this committee, but which has nevertheless not made it onto the evidentiary record before the committee. I don't think that's fair.
The rule at play here is one of due process. There's no question that this committee in Parliament, I should say more broadly, has the ability to control its own internal processes. However, I think we should refrain from disembarking from a long history, both in parliamentary democracy more broadly and our system of justice protecting due process. In fact, instead of dumping off the analysis without seeing complete information, I think the appropriate thing would be to ask the ministers responsible to make what disclosures remain outstanding.
The situation that we have here is impugning our professional public service, who remain non-partisan, for the jobs they have done. We heard directly from the Prime Minister, from the Prime Minister's chief of staff, from the then finance minister, from the Minister responsible for ESDC, and from staff. The process of accountability and, frankly, the transparency built throughout, is the kind of thing we had the opportunity to ask the ministers responsible about already. Now we're trying to pass judgment on the government's alleged violation of the committee's privileges based on documents from individual public servants who don't even have an opportunity to defend themselves, and without giving the opportunity for the minister responsible to actually offer the defence.
I know that honourable members on this committee are familiar with the concept of ministerial responsibility. In fact, the member from Carleton, in a previous Parliament, I believe it was in 2010, during a committee meeting said:
My comments will continue to focus on the conduct of political staff members and the importance of ministerial responsibility for that conduct. That is entirely pertinent to this motion, and if committee members disagree they will discard my arguments. I'm going to quote continually the rules as they are written: The individual or personal responsibility of the Minister derives from a time when in practice and not just in theory the Crown governed; Ministers merely advised the Sovereign and were responsible to the Sovereign for their advice. The principle of individual ministerial responsibility holds that Ministers are accountable not only for their own actions as department heads, but also for the actions of their subordinates....
He went on, and I'm reading from the original quote:
The principle of individual ministerial responsibility holds that Ministers are accountable not only for their own actions as department heads, but also for the actions of their subordinates; individual ministerial responsibility provides the basis for accountability throughout the system. Virtually all departmental activity is carried out in the name of a Minister who, in turn, is responsible to Parliament for those acts. Again: Virtually all departmental activity is carried out in the name of the Minister who, in turn, is responsible to Parliament for those acts.
This is a continuing quote from the member in this committee. He continued:We are Parliament in this committee, and it is ministers who are accountable to Parliament, according to the rules.Ministers exercise power and are constitutionally responsible for the provision and conduct of government; Parliament holds them personally responsible for it. The principle of collective ministerial responsibility, which is of a much more recent vintage, evolved when Ministers replaced the Sovereign as the decision-makers of government. Ministers are expected to take responsibility for, and defend, all Cabinet decisions. The principle provides stability within the framework of ministerial government by uniting the responsibilities of the individual Ministers under the collective responsibility of the Crown.
That latter point explains why Minister Baird is here to explain the conduct of a member of the Prime Minister's Office. Under the principle of collective responsibility, he, as a minister, a servant, is responsible in our system for defending the conduct of subordinates in this government. He has been so designated by the Prime Minister, who makes those designations by historic convention.
This is the foundation of our democratic system of government, Mr. Chair. It is not something that can be thrown away at a whim or dispensed with when a coalition of parties, through their numbers, seeks to undermine it in order to score a few short-term and myopic political points.
In the aftermath of the 2008 election, the coalition parties attempted to reverse the results of that vote. Now we are seeing them attempt to reverse the results of roughly 300 years of parliamentary tradition and replace it with a kangaroo court that would intimidate political staff members, whose responsibilities to this House flow through the ministers
Mr. Chair, the quote, I think, was well articulated at the time and is applicable today. What this committee is seeking to do, in the absence of the subamendment forming part of the motion to ultimately be adopted by this committee, is to attribute responsibility for violating the privileges of members of Parliament who serve on this committee to civil servants, by virtue of the evidentiary record that includes only testimony and emails that come specifically from civil servants. They won't even allow evidence from the head of the relevant departments or indeed the head of the civil service, the Clerk of the Privy Council, to be adduced into the evidentiary record. This would fly in the face of holding the minister responsible. I don't think it would be fair, frankly, to avoid an explanation from the government by the minister responsible by referring only to the documentary evidence that has been partially disclosed to this committee as a result of a technical difficulty during the uploading of the documents. Again, I'm referring specifically to the exclusion or attempted exclusion of the transmittal letters from the body of evidence that's before this committee.
With respect to the appropriateness of the redaction, I think the opportunity to explain is key. I think the transmittal letters would be essential, and I think that the government has demonstrated a willingness to work with this committee formally or informally, specifically when the Parliamentary Secretary to the House Leader made the invitation to say that if this committee is not satisfied with what it's received, the government would work in good faith with it.
There hasn't been an opportunity to even have that conversation directly with the government because there's this effort to have only a portion of the evidentiary record from the previous session of this Parliament introduced into the evidence currently before this committee.
The NDP had made the argument previously—and Mr. Poilievre has hinted at this as well—that because we have a supremacy over our ability to produce records, in fact...and the parliamentary law clerk made an allusion to this in the letter sent to members of this committee, but we also have letters specifically from the head of the public service, who explained that there are certain rules they are bound by. I think that attempting to reconcile those two points of view through conversation may in fact be a productive thing.
Specifically, Mr. Chair, the kinds of things that we're dealing with...and my colleague, Mr. Gerretsen went to great lengths to make these points during our previous meeting. If you read the transmittal letters, a lot of them say very similar things. The head of Canada's public service and the head of different departments have by and large explained that there were two kinds, two buckets, of documents each of which were treated differently by the motion this committee adopted back in July. Specifically, the motion states:
That, pursuant to Standing Order 108(1)(a), the Committee order that any contracts concluded with We Charity and Me to We, all briefing notes, memos and emails
—including the contribution agreement between the department and WE Charity—
from senior officials prepared for or sent to any Minister regarding the design and creation of the Canada Student Service Grant, as well as any written correspondence and records of other correspondence with We Charity and Me to We from March 2020 be provided to the Committee no later than August 8, 2020; that matters of Cabinet confidence and national security be excluded from the request;
—which is going to be important in just a moment—
and that any redactions necessary, including to protect the privacy of Canadian citizens and permanent residents whose names and personal information may be included in the documents, as well as public servants who have been providing assistance on this matter, be made by the Office of the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel of the House of Commons.
The two categories outlined in that motion include, first, the documents that would be subjected to cabinet confidence or that may have national security implications. The second would be redactions that are designed to deal with the privacy and personal information of individuals who are not members of this committee.
The first category is an important one. Each of the transmittal letters indicated that no redactions were made for national security purposes, so that is not really an issue before the committee, and I don't think anyone would dispute that, but I've been surprised before.
The second heading under that bucket, if you will, is cabinet confidences. There are explanations in each of the transmittal letters that certain redactions had been made for the purpose of protecting cabinet confidence, but, in fact, we never requested documents that touched on cabinet confidences.
You'll recall, Mr. Chair, that our colleague Mr. Poilievre, during the middle of the summer, was waving around pages that, in fact, were heavily redacted. I won't dispute that; in fact, pages were redacted. I think that's obvious, but what he didn't tell anybody is that those were documents that specifically weren't asked for because they were subject to cabinet confidence. I think that's pretty important.
The reason that we redacted pages at all was that we chose to produce.... I shouldn't say “we”; the government chose to produce documents that were not asked for even though they were subject to cabinet confidences and produced the portion of it that were relevant to the WE Charity matters that this committee had been looking at.
If you go through the document, you can see details of cabinet meetings that were revealed to this committee even though we specifically said we did not want them. The remaining pages that follow some of those were, in fact, heavily redacted, but again, they may have touched on anything from—