Excellent.
You have the funding envelope and the contingency fund. Picking up where I left off, you have the program support costs for ESDC, which included creating and launching the “I Want to Help” website. A cost estimate is included in there. There are assumptions about how those costs were arrived at, details on the plan to implement the program over a series of pages, and a heading entitled “Results”, which talks about what the anticipated outcomes would be. They are all there, in full and unredacted.
The final page of this document includes two redactions of, once again, the contact information for two individuals. Their names are present. Their position titles are present. One is Ritu Banerjee, executive director with the Canada Service Corps Secretariat in the skills and employment branch. Their phone number has been redacted. The second person is Sara Wiles, director at the Canada Service Corps Secretariat in the skills and employment branch. Their telephone numbers are redacted. In the entirety of that document, which describes in great detail the plan to develop, fund and implement the plan, including costing assumptions, including contingency plans, including implementation, all of it's there. Nothing has been redacted from that document, which, I would suggest, would be a key document in this entire controversy. The only redaction is the individual phone numbers of those two individuals who work with the Canada Service Corps Secretariat in the skills and employment branch.
Mr. Chair, let's look at page 404 of the same disclosure package, all of which still relates to the remittal letter that would be brought in by the subamendment. It's really a helpful document, I find. If you look at page 404, and I hope you're following along, there's a meeting invitation to discuss the WE contract. Now, the key part that was redacted in this document—Mr. Chair, if ever there was a smoking gun, it's here—was the conference ID for the teleconference hosting it. That's it. The details around it have been produced. I don't think anybody would have even cared if this document hadn't been produced, but it is relevant technically, so it should have been. It demonstrated that there was a teleconference where the WE contract was discussed. I only know that because that's the subject of the calendar appointment.
Actually, it provides the dial-in to the conference line, just not the conference ID to access it. Presumably, that same contact line has either expired or is still used by an organization. I don't know that it would be appropriate for members of the public to potentially be dialing in to a conference ID that could be in use by the government or others. It demonstrated that the meeting began at 4:30 and ended at 5. This technically is relevant, because it touches on a meeting, but by no means do I think it essential or appropriate to be disclosing something like the conference ID for the specific teleconference that was hosted that day.
Again, I'll make the point that the dispute is not even over whether this information should have been redacted. I expect that most members of the opposition—who, by the way, I tend to get along with personally when the cameras are not on—care about this conference ID. The fight is not even about the disclosure of that conference ID. It's about who should have made that decision.
Let's continue on to page 417, still from the same PCO disclosure that is attached to the original remittal letter I read out at the beginning of my remarks. It is labelled as “Secret”, “Limited Distribution” and “Confidence of the Queen's Privy Council”. It has a heading entitled “Memorandum for the Prime Minister”. It's a remarkable document. I don't expect memoranda to the Prime Minister would ordinarily be disclosed at all. Again, it's pages 417 through 419. It's a cabinet confidence document, clearly stamped “limited distribution”, as I mentioned. This particular memorandum to the Prime Minister asks for his decision regarding the Canada student service grant as well as other matters.
In this motion, which was put before the finance committee in the previous session of this Parliament, matters related to the grant program were requested. Here that information has been released, yet the items unrelated to cabinet confidences were redacted. They weren't asked for. They don't need to be shared, because even had we asked for them, they're subject to cabinet confidence, but of course the document was nevertheless produced. Only the issues that were outside of what the committee requested or that were subject to cabinet confidence would have been excluded, while some information that was relevant, which was nevertheless subject to cabinet confidence, was in fact disclosed.
If you continue, you see only minor redactions on the very first page, and then at the very end before you get to PCO recommendations. If you have access to the remittal letter, you'll understand that the Clerk of the Privy Council explicitly shared that certain items that were relevant to the discourse the committee was undertaking were shared with the committee, even though they would ordinarily be subject to confidence. In the absence of those remittal letters, which members of the opposition are seeking to have excluded, you might rightly have some questions about why certain documents were redacted, but it's been explained to us by the Clerk of the Privy Council. In fact, the entirety of this document ordinarily would not be subject to disclosure; nevertheless, the document in large part has been provided.
You're probably starting to pick up a bit of a theme, Mr. Chair. I'm looking at document number 426, still attached to that initial remittal letter from the Clerk of the Privy Council. It's an email from the PCO release, sent by Ms. Rosanne MacKay at PCO to one of her colleagues, Alain Beaudoin. The topic is a cabinet meeting note for the Prime Minister. The redaction here, once again, is Ms. MacKay's phone number.
The document itself includes some information that probably didn't need to be produced. It goes into detail about different programs on an agenda from the week prior to the email being sent that related to a whole series of government programs, like the Canada emergency wage subsidy, CERB, IRAP, the Canada summer jobs program, the Canada emergency commercial rent assistance, the Canada emergency business account, OAS, the guaranteed income supplement, RRIFs for seniors and the CESB for students. Each of these programs, of course, was advanced in the midst of the pandemic and was covered as part of the attached draft meeting management note.
If you scroll down to the end of the correspondence, what you're left with again is a single redaction, and it's Ms. MacKay's phone number. Again, I feel compelled to point out that the dispute is not over whether that should have been redacted but only about who should have made the redaction. We're having this debate now over whether it should have been the Clerk of the Privy Council or the parliamentary law clerk.
I don't think it would be appropriate, and again I really don't think my honourable colleagues in any party actually want this information. I think they want to maintain the suggestion that because there were any redactions, the government is hiding something, when in fact we're showing, by going through these documents one by one, that even where there is no obligation to produce a document, the government often did so when it was relevant, and it actually provided useful information to the committee.
If you look at pages 428 through 432, again from PCO, there is a document with very limited redactions. At the top of the page you will see that a conference ID for a teleconference was blacked out on this particular page. The information that's actually been included relates to the wage subsidy, and they explain the different civil servants who were involved with the call. They talk about some of the different programs related to the pandemic response. There is one small piece that has been redacted and is labelled not relevant.
Similarly, on the next page, 90% or more of the document has been disclosed. There's a small point that's not relevant. If you read the remittal letter, you will understand specifically how decisions about relevance were made and why those particular pieces of information were not disclosed as part of the page that was included in the disclosure package.
If you continue to scroll down, you'll see that the pages following are entirely unredacted. All of the information about these different programs is already there. In fact, it probably goes significantly beyond what the committee asked for, but we know from the explanation that was specifically given in the remittal letter that some of these documents were included so as to give as wide a disclosure as possible.
When you continue on through the document, you'll see that there are no further redactions at all. Some of this information probably didn't need to be produced, but in the spirit of a broad document production, it's pretty clear that the way this document was redacted demonstrates that the government wanted to show all that it could show that could possibly relate to the program.
I'm looking now at pages 433 to page 434. The complaint here seems to be that—