Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that.
I see my opposition colleagues, but I'm not sure if they have been following along with what Liberal members have been putting forward. Mr. Longfield gave a really outstanding overview of the issues at play here. I certainly hope that the opposition colleagues were listening intently. If they were not, and if they are looking for something else to do during tonight's proceedings, I would advise them that the speech given by the Minister of Finance today is tremendously interesting, and they can pass their time that way. That way, at least they would be able to bring ideas to committee—hopefully in the coming weeks—that could be discussed and focused upon. Issues around the debt-to-GDP ratio and economic growth were among a number of points raised in the speech given by the finance minister earlier today.
With that said, though, I do want to put into the record something that allows us as a committee to further understand the matter at hand and to further put the issues being discussed here into proper context.
I will cite relevant references by previous Conservative Party of Canada ministers and MPs as they relate to the redaction of documents by the government of the day. I will go through a few examples, Mr. Chair.
The first comes from April 25, 2007. It's a quotation from Peter MacKay, as follows:
Mr. Speaker, that is patently false. These reports are received, reviewed and redacted in exactly the same fashion as they have since 2002. The previous government went through the same process. There are lawyers and officials in all departments who make these decisions independent of the political branch of government. There were no ministers and certainly the Prime Minister was not involved in any redaction[s] and decisions made as to what information was to be redacted in the reports.
A further example is from MP Tom Lukiwski from 2011. March 9 is the specific date of the record here in front of us. It reads:
Mr. Speaker, I simply want to suggest that the government believed that the information we provided would satisfy the members opposite in their desire to find information as the cost of our crime bills, our law and order bills.
The quote continues:
However, one thing needs to be discussed here and I hope it is something that would be acceptable to all members. We need to respect, in all cases, cabinet confidence. I know the member for Kings—Hants has argued that a previous government, the previous Liberal government, had released cabinet confidence when requested by the House. However, Mr. Speaker, I think you would find historically that is not the case. There needs to be respect for cabinet and respect for the information discussed in cabinet. That is fundamental to our democracy. While I can appreciate the member wanting information that would satisfy [him] and his committee members in trying to determine absolute costs, the member also needs to respect cabinet confidence. We respect the decision by the Chair, obviously, and we are not challenging that. However, does my hon. colleague believe that the cabinet confidence is fundamental to the democracy of Canadian government?
Obviously, it was a rhetorical question made by Mr. Lukiwski.
Again, on the same date, the same MP continued:
Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to hear [from] my colleague from Kings—Hants [that he] agrees that there is such a concept as cabinet confidence. However, I think it is important to realize again, as I pointed out in my earlier intervention to his original point of privilege, that cabinet confidence has to be respected in Parliament. What the member is talking about now, though, is information that he needs and his colleagues need in committee to determine whether the legislation brought forward by this government is actually not only affordable to the Canadian public, but necessary. I would point out that prior to the decision today, the government provided that information to the opposition. In other words, as I pointed out in my intervention, we provided the information contained within the documents but not the documents themselves.
My question for the member of the opposition was not whether or not information was or was not provided. It has been clear that information was provided.
My question was whether documents that are considered to be cabinet confidence should be protected by confidence, not turned over at the sheer desire of an opposition that may be doing it strictly for partisan purposes.
I'm reading the quotes here, Mr. Chair. It's all very interesting that Conservatives felt this way at one point in previous times.
It continues: “The question I asked dealt with information versus documents and I did not hear a distinct answer to the question”. That's the end of that particular quotation.
I'll continue with a further example, this one from former justice minister Rob Nicholson, who, on March 31, 2010, said the following:
First, as is well established in law and parliamentary practice, the principle of necessity must underscore all matters of privilege. Second, as parliamentarians, we should always be guided by a principle of great restraint when asserting privileges of the House.... The central issue before you, Mr. Speaker, is whether parliamentary privilege gives the House an absolute and unqualified right to order the production of documents and to receive the documents and whether any expression of views that it might not constitute a contempt of the House.
Mr. Nicholson continued:
On this point, I would remind the House that our parliamentary privileges are not indefinite, nor unlimited, but defined by the Constitution in the Parliament of Canada Act as those possessed by the United Kingdom House of Commons in 1867. On the second point, I would remind the House that exact scope of those privileges have been a matter of debate since Confederation. As you know, Mr. Speaker, many of our parliamentary privileges are unwritten. While there may be general agreement on the existence of parliamentary privilege, because our privileges are not codified, there are quite often debates on the scope of our privileges. There have been occasion where the Government of Canada and the House of Commons have taken different positions on the scope of parliamentary privilege. An example was in the case of Vaid, where the Attorney General of Canada and the House of Commons took different views on the scope of the powers of the House to regulate its internal affairs. We also saw in that case that the scope of the powers of the House was found to be more limited than that what had been claimed. A similar debate is before us today. The member for Scarborough—Rouge River has expressed an opinion on the scope of the powers of the House to send for papers. The Minister of National Defence, on behalf of the government, has taken a different view. Similarly, the law clerk of the House of Commons has expressed his opinion on the powers of parliamentary committees to compel the testimony of witnesses. And the Department of Justice has expressed a different point of view with respect to government officials who are bound by the law and ought not to be pressured by parliamentary committees to breach their duties under statutes like the Privacy Act.... For example, Speaker Beaudoin observed in 1957: No matter how ample its powers may be—