Thank you. I apologize for the technical inconveniences. My Microsoft Edge was going through an update and I had too many other programs open. I've closed them all and I got my hot water and lemon, so hopefully that will help out.
I think as I was leaving off I was talking about page 494 from the ESDC documents and looking at what the parliamentary law clerk had decided in terms of what needed to be redacted, including emails and names. It's similar to what we saw on the other documents. Whereas, if we compare it to what the government House leader released, as completed by the professional non-partisan public service, we find no redactions whatsoever.
Again, Rachel Wernick was redacted several times, but now we know who she was and who the author of the document was. We even have her mobile phone number, which was raised a number of times last week, and I can just imagine that if that is public and people have her cell number…. We all know what that does to your life when you're in the middle of a family gathering and someone's calling you asking about redacted documents, but that's the type of public servant we have and were trying to protect. For the purpose of the committee's work, we now know some of those details that were being protected before.
I find it interesting that the opposition has continued, in public, to call into question these documents. They were provided to our committee. It is like a dog chasing a car down the street. The car stops, and the dog doesn't know what to do. You have what you needed, so now what do you want to do with it?
My colleagues will understand that there's always been an inherent tension between what we ask for and can receive as parliamentarians, and the ability of the government to safely provide the documents without compromising the responsible functioning of the government. It's really not a question of covering things up. It's a protection of our civil service, who have been working extremely hard through COVID and always.
When I was first elected, I was just amazed by the professionalism of our public service. They always ask if there is anything more they can do for you. They give you things faster than you expect and then ask what else you need. Those are the people we are trying to protect so that we can use their information without sharing the information that would directly connect them, and we speak on their behalf when we're in committee.
Again, with the subamendment, we are getting the heads of the civil service and the law clerk to come and answer as to what the process of redaction is and what process they were following, because we received the documents through their work. How they make those decisions really should be of interest to the committee so that we know what process is followed.
As a democracy, we do have the three equal branches of government, and whether it's the Supreme Court of Canada, the Senate or the House of Commons, we are all working together for Canadians. It has been recognized, though, that Parliament is supreme, because we are the elected officials, unlike other democracies. I'm thinking of south of us where judges are elected. In our case we have appointment systems for the other orders of Parliament, but we are the ones who are elected by the people of Canada, so the extent to which our supremacy allows for the production of cabinet confidences has been a matter of debate for some time.
We also know that, as cabinet is discussing things, we end up in a different place at the end of the discussion from where we started. If you start at the beginning of the discussion and ask what cabinet's doing, and then the cabinet doesn't deliver on that, that would really undermine the trust that Canadians have in cabinet.
It is similar to a board meeting. In business we had board meetings all the time where we would talk about the future of the company, and sometimes, in times like this, we would be asking how many people we would have to lay off, and sometimes we would find ways so that we didn't have to lay them off. We would get support from the Government of Canada in the case of the businesses now getting support, so that they don't have to lay people off, and those decisions are made. Once they know that the support's in place from the Government of Canada, people don't have to lose sleep because they're going to be losing their jobs, because we're supporting them.
However, those are discussions that are done behind closed doors, not to be nefarious, not to try to hide things, but really to protect your employees from concerns that they don't have to worry about. You're paid as a manager to worry about what needs to be done on behalf of the people you're serving in your company. It's similar to what we do when we're serving the people in our communities. The Government of Canada's cabinet has to be able to have those very frank discussions of worst-case scenarios and then plan around those without causing turmoil in people's homes, or even in stock markets, for that matter.
We could go into great detail about several of the Tory ministers and MPs, including the member for Carleton, who have argued in favour of safeguarding cabinet confidences. Regardless of the stripe of your party, you can understand that certain things have to be done in confidence for very many different reasons—for when you're working with different governments across the world, for world security, for the security of....
In terms of people at their kitchen tables, my family doesn't know a lot of the discussions we have in government, because I'm there for them, as I'm there for the other families in Guelph. They don't need to know what's keeping me up at night. My wife will know sometimes that I've been up at night, but she won't know that I'm worrying about the businesses in Guelph—