Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the committee members. I'm pleased to be with you tonight.
I sat in on some of the meetings last week, and I was surprised that only the Liberals were talking about the documents that everybody wanted to see. Now we have the documents in front of us, and we have an amendment on the floor to bring in the people who did some redacting to explain the redactions.
I did see the presentation last week by Mr. Fraser, which was excellent in explaining how redactions happen and what was being redacted, and the pattern over and over of a mobile cellphone number that was redacted several times to protect the public servant, or in that case to protect their privacy, a person from the WE Charity who was being referenced in the documents. Canadian citizens who come forward and provide information for us also have protections under the rules of the committee.
In the rules of the committee I was surprised that Mr. Julian commented about having the Speaker rule on the committee and turning over our privilege to the Speaker. We all know in the House of Commons that committees are the masters of their own destinies. Pierre Poilievre's motion quotes the Speaker saying that the committee, which has control over the interpretation of its order, has an opportunity to examine the documents and decide what to do with them, which is what we're talking about tonight.
Without the subamendment, we're not doing what the Speaker asked. We're not having people be witnesses for us to explain positions and why things happened in the way they happened. We're saying we have the documents, and that's not enough. We need to know about the redactions, but we don't want to talk about them. We're chasing our own tail, and as Ms. Koutrakis said, I hope there is a way forward that could see the committee moving forward.
In the meantime, it's very important to discuss the documents in front of us. I thank Mr. Fragiskatos for mentioning that I'm a bit of an innovation geek. That came from being a managing director of a few businesses where we put in ISO 9000 quality management systems. This is the quality management system of the House of Commons: how we get documents in front of us to make sure that quality systems are being followed, and then bring people forward to discuss the quality system in application and how they interpreted it so that we could see whether there are differences in interpretation.
Everything we do has to do with documents. Last week the whole agreement was in front of the committee and could have been discussed, but the redactions were discussed. I won't go into that because tonight we're talking about amendments.
The agreement was very interesting. I have sat on 28 not-for-profit boards. My wife keeps track. The agreements we had with different orders of government and different types of not-for-profits were either contribution agreements, where you were paid up front to deliver services, or agreements where you were reimbursed later after you had provided services. IRAP is an example, the industrial research assistance program that we provide businesses. We were delivering it through a few not-for-profits in Guelph, and we had to up front the money. We did that through the chamber of commerce, through an agreement we set up with them to work with their balance sheet instead of our balance sheet as we were starting Innovation Guelph. We were able to provide services through the IRAP agreement and then had to report what we had done to the government to get reimbursed.
Other agreements we have, such as the one WE Charity had, are where you get paid up front. Then you have to report on how the money is disbursed and the qualifications for how the money gets disbursed. Who qualifies, how they qualified, how they were measured, how they report back to the government was all included in those documents in depth. We won't go over that tonight.
When you hear in the House of Commons comments that it was the Prime Minister's bank account, or this had something to do with the Prime Minister's family, it was a document that was a legal agreement between a charity and the Government of Canada, and that charity, through its board of directors, like any not-for-profit, has to be able to report finances and is largely controlled by a volunteer board of directors.
I'm not sure whether WE Charity had any paid board of directors members, but usually the board of directors oversees the disbursement of funds and then reports back that the agreements have been reached. Having sat on boards, I and the other members were very concerned about these reports coming back to us because the board members had the fiduciary responsibility to make sure that everything was being done properly so that we would eventually get paid back, or that we wouldn't have to give back to the government money we had misappropriated or misspent.
I was following Ms. Koutrakis very closely so that we wouldn't duplicate any pages. I'm starting on page 54 and page 55. The curtain has been lifted, if you will. For many of the redactions that we discussed in the committee last week, the committee has been shown what was behind the redacted black bar.
In regard to the motion before us, I'd like the committee to look through a number of these documents that we have in our digital binder, which really only the Liberals are discussing. Hopefully the other parties will also join in the discussion. This is the only way we can get it on the record that we now have these internal documents, the documents that are on our committee's website, and they can compare what the government provided to the parties through the government House leader's office. I'd also like to note that the government House leader's office provided the parties with a USB stick on the day of prorogation that contained all the documents that were submitted to the law clerk.
Before I get started, I just want to speak about the PCO document that was provided to the committee by the law clerk after his redactions. At page 55, if you want to look at that, you'll be aware that it was completely blacked out. That was one of those pages that was in the infamous press gallery scene when Mr. Poilievre theatrically waved some of the papers in front of the cameras and threw some of them in the air to show that some sort of government cover-up was happening. I think he would know, if he'd looked at the documents, that the redactions were there because there was a reason for the information to be taken out, and in those sections that were fully blacked out it had something to do with cabinet confidence.
Page 54 of the same document was also fully redacted, to such an extent that only the subject and date were visible. You know what was on the page but you can't see the details or the reasons our public service made that decision. Again, they could come and explain to the committee if the committee would have them. For now, our only witness is the document, which is why documents are so important in Parliament. Sometimes the document is all you have to go on.
I'm sure that none of the pages provided by the government House leader are in fact redacted. The entire page was redacted by the law clerk in the documents that he briefly provided to the committee.
I know in some of the debates people get heated and they say that the Prime Minister is the one who redacted these documents, or the House leader redacted these documents, and that the government is covering this up. Really, the decisions on the redactions were made by our independent public service, which provided thousands of pages for us to review. To see them thrown on the floor was a disservice to the public service, and it was also a disservice to documents in general.
Documents are sacred. If you think of documents in some of the major faiths of the world, they are sacred. It would be like my standing up at mass, being a lector, which I am, and pulling pages out of the lectionary and throwing them on the floor. The documents that we rely on need to be treated with respect. To see them thrown all over the floor was disrespectful of the documents. It would be like taking the Quran or the Sikh sacred writings or the Torah and disrespecting them. We have to respect the documents of Parliament, and the people behind those documents.