Finance Committee on Nov. 5th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Ms. Koutrakis, there is a point of order from Mr. Lawrence.

Mr. Lawrence, go ahead.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

I'm a patient man. I have a five-year-old and a six-year-old, and they've taught me patience, but when we're talking about Mr. Julian perhaps being part of the extreme right, I think we've gone too far. I have no idea how this has anything to do with the subamendment.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

I don't—

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

That wasn't a point of order. It was a point of debate.

Mr. Fragiskatos, is yours debate or a point of order?

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I believe it is a point of order, Mr. Chair. It is simply a matter of being respectful and collegial towards colleagues to allow them to finish making their points and not twisting around their words for political purposes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

I don't think that's a point of order, Mr. Fragiskatos. That's debate.

We'll be going back to Ms. Koutrakis.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank my colleague for his point of order. I guess we're going to agree to disagree on that point.

I'll go back to my comments and say that I have never, in all my time as an MP—and it's been just a little bit over a year—seen an opposition party refuse to allow a public servant with relevant information to testify before a committee, especially when that public servant is the top boss. I've said this before in previous comments, and I echo what my colleague Ms. Dzerowicz said earlier. If we place doubt in the Clerk of the Privy Council, then we absolutely have a much bigger issue on our hands than debating the subamendment to the subamendment to perhaps another subamendment.

It was clear from the outset what this committee requested in regard to documentation, and it was clear from the testimony of the Clerk of the Privy Council here what we would receive from him. In fact, again, over 5,000 pages of relevant information were released with limited redaction. The clerk noted that he would endeavour to ensure that this committee would have the information it needed to fully understand what occurred with the design and implementation of the Canada student service grant.

He kept up his end of the bargain. My colleagues on the other side know full well that the redactions present in those documents are about unrelated matters, but due to the nature of the document, they were redacted to allow for the information about the CSSG to be present. The law clerk himself redacted further, not only when he received the documents but he redacted some of the redactions. That is my understanding.

The motion by this committee recognized that these unrelated cabinet confidences would be redacted. This committee also understood that the parliamentary law clerk would remove some personal information from the documents as well. The Clerk of the Privy Council could be saying this himself if we were to invite him here. I'm happy to hear that Mr. Julian says he wouldn't have a problem to have Mr. Shugart before us because I really believe we should, sooner rather than later. He actually took the extraordinary step of leaving in the names of public servants, and advised the Privacy Commissioner that this would be the case. The Clerk of the Privy Council cannot control the fact that it was the motion by this committee that later caused the law clerk to redact those very names that the clerk endeavoured to release. If he could be here, he could explain that positioning himself.

This committee received these documents on time. They were forwarded to the law clerk, as was expressly stated in the initial motion, and here we have the law clerk completing his own redactions right around the time of prorogation. The law clerk released these documents to the members of this committee. The interesting thing here is that clearly the redactions by the law clerk are much more intensive than the redactions in the original documents handed over by the public service.

In order to ensure full transparency, the government House leader released the less-redacted documents anyway. In essence, the Government of Canada fulfilled the promise of the Clerk of the Privy Council and the request of this committee vis-à-vis the motion requesting documents. If the Clerk of the Privy Council were allowed to testify, he would back up this very simple fact.

This brings us back around again to why we are still here debating this subamendment. Quite simply, we are here because the opposition majority cannot accept that they were actually given everything they wanted. It doesn't square with the narrative that they are trying to put out in public, just as the testimony of the clerk would not fit the narrative they are trying to put out in public. Here we are debating a subamendment to an amendment to a motion that, in the end, is just a procedural trick to try to further this cheap political stunt that is now falling apart day by day.

We are weeks into this at this point. We have pre-budget consultations that this committee is mandated to complete, and I fully agree with Mr. Julian that we have to get to that.

We have a fix before us. With one simple vote we could set aside Mr. Poilievre's motion today, not defeat it but set it aside. We can invite the head of the public service, the Clerk of the Privy Council, Mr. Shugart, to this committee, and then he, along with relevant deputy ministers, can present their thinking and reasoning around the documents that were provided.

They could walk us through how all discussions and decisions regarding the Canada student service grant were unredacted. They can walk us through why some matters were redacted, and how they were unrelated to our topic of study. They can finally put to rest any concerns of the opposition.

I know this wouldn't fit the narrow political interests that the majority opposition has tried to push. I know this would completely blow apart the fictitious narrative that Mr. Poilievre is trying to spin; however, so be it. Mr. Poilievre and the other opposition members want to get to the truth, so here we are. Let's get to the truth. It's time for the non-partisan head of our public service to come before us and give us the truth.

I have done this before. I am going to repeat my comments. I urge colleagues to put aside their partisan differences, to finally return to past times of collegiality and decorum in Parliament, to remember we are here in this place to serve our constituents and to put their interests first. Let's show some respect for our professional and non-partisan members of the public service, not use them as ploys in a political game.

Mr. Chair, I ask colleagues to work with us to approve the subamendment to invite the Clerk of the Privy Council and other deputy ministers here forthwith.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you, Ms. Koutrakis. I am hopeful for discussions on the side as well.

I have on my list Ms. Khalid, Mr. McLeod, Mr. Fragiskatos and Ms. Dzerowicz.

Go ahead, Ms. Khalid.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the members for indulging my participation in the committee today.

Mr. Chair, if it's okay with you, can I please concede a few minutes of my time to Ms. Dzerowicz?

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

It's my understanding that every MP is an associate member of the committees of Parliament, so it's no indulgence at all. Ms. Khalid is here by right, and she is very polite and generous to talk about indulgence. It's our pleasure to have her here. I want to put that on the record.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

It's absolutely our pleasure to have her here, and Mr. Lawrence. We've had others from time to time. You are sworn in, Ms. Khalid, in place of Mr. Fraser, I believe, and notices went to the clerk that you are in his place.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you very much for that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Go ahead, Ms. Khalid.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

As I was saying, Mr. Chair, is it okay to have Ms. Dzerowicz take a few minutes of my time at this point? I'd like to add on to what she has to say as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

It's okay if you're ceding some of your time to Ms. Dzerowicz.

Go ahead, Ms. Dzerowicz.

[Julie Dzerowicz, Liberal, Davenport, ON]

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to my honourable colleague Ms. Khalid.

Welcome to our committee.

I appreciate the nobleness of Mr. Fragiskatos' comments. He is indeed correct.

Sometimes when people make a point, I kind of forget it. As I get older I do forget my comments and I prefer to make them almost right away. Mr. Julian made a number of comments, and I want to address them directly.

The first is that we're holding up the finance committee from moving forward to pre-budget consultations. In this meeting I've not said this and it's very important for me to reiterate it.

On October 8, when we first convened as the finance committee after we had elected our chair and our vice-chairs, I presented a pre-budget consultation motion. I was the first one out the door to do so. We could have gone ahead with it if Mr. Julian or any one of the opposition members decided they were going to support it. That did not happen.

Mr. Poilievre interrupted our ability to move to a vote to decide on pre-budget consultations with a motion on a point of privilege, following which we have gone to a subamendment to an amendment of the original motion. I want to make sure I put that on the table. We wanted to go right into pre-budget consultations. I do not take lightly anyone saying that in any way the Liberal government team has been trying to stop us from moving directly to pre-budget consultations.

I want to get to Mr. Poilievre's motion. In his point of privilege that he says we should vote on, he said, “Your Committee has concluded that the government's response failed to comply with the order”—which is the July 7 order—in terms of having all of the WE documents submitted to the public and the law clerk for redaction.

We have spent every single meeting since October 8 proving that we have completely followed through on that July 7 motion. We've explained why we followed through on it. We have explained what cabinet confidences were. We explained the transmittal letters. We have gone through every single bit of it. We even gave examples ad nauseam of what was actually redacted. We then put the subamendment on the table in order to say, look, even if you don't believe us, why don't we bring the people to the table? Let's bring the Clerk of the Privy Council. Let's bring the law clerk. Let's bring any relevant deputy ministers, and let's, in public, transparently, deal with this once and for all, because we don't think there is any smoking gun. There is nothing that we are trying to cover.

We proposed that motion fairly early on, and that was, again, not taken up by Mr. Julian or by any of the other opposition members. I do not take lightly anyone saying that we have in any way tried to hold up the pre-budget consultations. If anything, we have done our very best at every moment to try to move as quickly and as expeditiously as possible to pre-budget consultations.

I want to reiterate another point I've made. Mr. Julian has proposed zero new ideas for how we can actually break this logjam.

With that I want to say a huge thanks to Ms. Khalid for allowing me a few minutes to address Mr. Julian's comments.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you, Ms. Dzerowicz.

We'll go back to Ms. Khalid.

[Iqra Khalid, Liberal, Mississauga—Erin Mills, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

As Mr. Fragiskatos pointed out, I am an associate member of this committee but I only watch the committee proceedings from the outside. I don't get to see what is happening within the committee and to understand the intricate delicacies of all the motions and the various amendments to the motions, and then the various subamendments to the motions, and then, as Mr. Julian tried to do today, a subamendment to the subamendment.

As I get on the phone with my constituents about what happens in Ottawa, I had a very interesting call with a young lady who had been following what's been happening with this specific topic over the past number of months. She asked me to explain to her what is going on. She asked what exactly is the objective of doing all this? What are we trying to prove here? Is this going to better our government services in any way? How is this going to impact me personally?

I listened to her and her frustrations, and initially I started to try to explain exactly what was going on. I think we both got lost in all the proceedings, etc., and then she told me to stop. She asked if I could tell her one thing that was going to help her as my constituent out of all these documents that were being put forward, all this questioning of the integrity of the public service or the integrity of x, y or z people among those whom we elected to serve us. I thought about it for a minute and I said I really couldn't point to a single thing that would impact the challenges she was having at this time with affordability, housing, finding affordable child care, worrying about her kids and their safety in their school—how that's going to go—and her job.

As I sat here today, watched the discussions with intrigue and saw the subamendments being proposed here in front of me, I tried to get a grasp of this myself. I think my two cents to this debate would be to help us understand and to add that extra value of why we're sitting in these seats in the first place, why we are working long hours, why we travel all across the country or halfway across the country, whether it's virtually or in person, to sit in the House and to debate a lot of these important issues.

Really why we do all of that is to serve Canadians, to ensure that the time we're spending in these debates is of value to individual Canadians and to young families who are trying to thrive and strive in this very serious pandemic, and to make sure that the health and well-being of Canadians is well taken care of. I think that's our obligation as members of Parliament, regardless of what side of the aisle we sit on.

I know for a fact how hard each one of us works. I sat on committee with Mr. Falk in the last Parliament. We were on the justice committee together and we had such a wonderful relationship with respect to the work we were doing in that committee, again serving Canadians.

We've travelled together—

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Ms. Khalid, I believe Ms. Jansen is making a point. I see her waving her hands around. I don't hear her through the system, but I think she is making a point on relevance, although I know Mr. Falk wanted you to talk about him on the justice committee.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

If yours is a point of order, go ahead, Mr. Fragiskatos.

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I believe it is a point of order, Mr. Chair.

I don't know Ms. Jansen very well. Obviously, she is a newly elected MP. I would just ask her, if she does, indeed, have an issue, something that she wishes to raise by way of a point of order, that she actually formally intervene because it's not parliamentary practice to wave one's arms. I also noticed that when she does have particular issues, she seems to be laughing along. I'm not sure if that is done as a measure of goodwill or if that's done because she disagrees with the speaker.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

I don't think that is the—

[Peter Fragiskatos, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

She can simply say, “I have a point of order,” and intervene that way, rather than forcing you to guess, which is very unfair to you, Mr. Chair.

Frankly, the point of order that she apparently wished to make is one that I take issue with. Ms. Khalid was staying entirely relevant, and I think was putting on the record very pertinent points.