I note Mr. Fraser's humour. We shouldn't laugh too loud. There was basically no Bloc Québécois when Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister. They had been dead and gone and a relic of the past, and there was no separatist movement out west; now we have them both back. Maybe by the time we're done this meeting, the Prime Minister will have successfully alienated enough British Columbians to add them to the list—but hopefully not.
On the subject at hand, Mr. Chair, we're simply asking the government to do as the committee requested, which is to hand the documents over to the clerk, and for the law clerk to decide what should be released and what should not. We originally asked that. We passed it in a motion, and the government has violated that motion.
There seems to be some confusion with respect to cabinet confidences. We're not asking for the public release of cabinet confidences. We are asking for the law clerk to determine if the WE scandal documents that were excluded are in fact cabinet confidences, or if they have been misclassified as such by the Prime Minister and the officials who depend on him for their jobs.
What we are simply asking—and we offered a very generous compromise—is that all the documents that were excluded or redacted simply go to the law clerk, who is the lawyer for the entire House of Commons, and that he consider whether or not the redactions and exclusions were appropriate, and report back to the House accordingly. The government says, well, why don't we just bring in the Prime Minister's deputy? The deputy relies on the Prime Minister for his job and can be fired by the Prime Minister at any time. The deputy was hired by the Prime Minister, who decides on the financial bonus. The deputy, in every way, shape or form, reports directly to the Prime Minister. Of course, that is not an acceptable solution to this problem.
The same clerk, probably under some duress, though he would not admit it publicly, deprived the Ethics Commissioner of information related to the SNC scandal. That prevented the Ethics Commissioner from fully disclosing the truth in that previous scandal. We can't simply rely on the Prime Minister's personal deputy to decide what Canadians should see and what they should not see. That is not appropriate.
Rather, we're proposing that a truly independent individual—that is, the lawyer for the House of Commons, who represents all 338 of us, who represents the institution of Parliament, not the government, not the opposition, not anybody in particular, but all of us generally—review the documents and report back to us on whether or not we have received everything we're entitled to according to the motion.
If everything has been released and if all of the so-called cabinet confidences are in fact confidences, then the government should have nothing to worry about. There really wouldn't be any controversy. The law clerk would say so. He would come before the committee and say, “Well, folks, I have reviewed all these exclusions and redactions and it turns out they were all appropriate, so we don't need to pursue the matter any further.” However, for some reason the government is just terrified that the law clerk would have this kind of access.
I would point out, with respect to the law clerk, that he and his office have high-level security clearance. There is no risk that they are going to find cabinet confidences and pick up the phone and call a journalist or head to Twitter and tweet the information out online. The cabinet confidences they have in their possession, according to this motion, would be kept confidential, because the law clerk would be so ordered by this committee.
Were he to violate that edict, he would blow up his entire career and his life. He would not be able to practise law, because he would be expelled from the bar if he were to violate solicitor-client privilege. He would obviously be removed as the law clerk of the House of Commons. His life's work would be in tatters.
We don't have a risk here that the law clerk, our lawyer, is going to take these documents and dump them on the Internet or proclaim on the floor of the House of Commons. We can count on him to report back to us in a manner that is accurate but that does not reveal any confidences.
In fact, I stated earlier today not that the law clerk would take the documents and publish them, but that he would look at the documents and confirm whether or not the redactions and the exclusions were appropriate and report accordingly to this committee in testimony. This should be a very easy thing to do.
To suggest that it has never been done is completely false. Of course, during the SNC-Lavalin scandal the Prime Minister was forced to reveal some cabinet confidences because he had one of his most senior ministers alleging that, under the dome of cabinet confidentiality, he was committing grievous acts of ethical violence in that he was applying undue pressure to absolve a corporate criminal from prosecution. As a result, yes, cabinet confidences were published to the justice committee.
Furthermore, confidences that would normally be left in the hands of ministers have been shared with other branches of Parliament. We now have a committee on national security, which is able to go around the normal restrictions on confidentiality and review state secrets, with an oath that they not speak of those secrets anywhere, ever, with threat of charge. There is a second precedent for this sort of thing.
Frankly, the parliamentary tradition is that ministers can bring citizens into their confidence if they are so authorized by the Crown, represented by the Prime Minister. This would be entirely legitimate. It would be completely reasonable.
The only reason the government would resist such a compromise is that they're terrified that the law clerk is going to look at these documents and say that these are not cabinet confidences and they never were, that these are not legitimate redactions and in fact there are no legitimate redactions. The House of Commons has the right to see any document—unredacted—that it chooses, regardless of statutes related to access to information or privacy. That's not covered in parliamentary privilege.
They're worried that the law clerk is going to see this and say that they've been covering all this up, that it has nothing to do with cabinet confidence and everything to do with protecting the culpable. Then he will presumably report that to this committee. That's why the Liberals on the committee are acting so erratically.
Here we should be performing a pre-budget consultation. The Conservatives have been crying out for the need to start a pre-budget consultation, so we can get this disastrous economy back on track. Don't get us wrong; we realize that Canada's economy is the worst in the G7, with the highest unemployment, by far the highest deficit, the poorest growth prospects—