I agree entirely with Ms. Jansen.
On the first point regarding the WE scandal, this is five weeks that the government members have been dawdling and giving 171,000 words of speechifying. They're talking about the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, Greek philosophers, cartoon characters and everything under the sun to run out the clock and avoid releasing these documents.
Today I came forward with a motion that reflected the compromise that the Liberal House leader effectively agreed to when he tweeted about it earlier this week. Now we're finding that tweet isn't consistent with what the Liberals are prepared to do. We said we would be willing to put aside for now the documents that the government claims are cabinet secrets and that the government would release everything else. They claim it was cabinet confidentiality that they needed to protect, and that was their major objection with releasing these documents unredacted. We put forward a motion that does what they they wanted to do, and now they're saying they're not so sure.
The timelines are not an excuse either. The documents are in the government's possession. All they have to do is send them over without the black ink. If they have versions with black ink, they must also have the pre-existing versions without black ink. These are digital documents. I presume that the copies sent over to the committee were not the only copies, that they are now blacked out and there's no way to get hold of the originals. The originals are there. The government knows what they are. They have an army of public servants who can produce them without the black ink. They could send them over on a USB stick, or possibly even an email attachment, to the law clerk this evening if they wanted to. To suggest that they can't get it done by Thursday—sorry, Friday.... I gave them until Friday, for God's sake. I don't know how long it takes it to send an email.
Then to claim that they can't get their act together and have the Clerk of the Privy Council come to testify by the date in the motion, which is I think mid next week...that too is ridiculous. He lives in Ottawa. He has access to electronic communications. He certainly can make himself available. It would not be hard for him to move his schedule around because the Parliament of Canada has asked him to do so.
There is no logistical reason that the government can't simply agree to this motion tonight. It's more dawdling and more delay. Meanwhile, we have millions who are without work and businesses are getting evicted, because the government once again messed up the rent relief program, a program that could have been fixed here in this committee but for the fact that we're paralyzed by a five-week Liberal filibuster. Now we're being asked for another 48 hours for them to go back to read a one-paragraph motion.
With regard to section 69, Mr. Fraser, I think you're being a little bit modest about your abilities. You are a skilled lawyer and a learned gentleman. You can read section 69 of the Access to Information Act in a couple of minutes. You are more than intelligent enough to do that. In fact, I rather suspect that you know the section already, because I know you spend a lot of time reading these statutes. I don't say that facetiously. You could master that section very quickly. It's short. It's about 100 words long and basically says “cabinet confidences”.
None of the excuses we're hearing today make any sense. It looks like we're being sent off on another wild goose chase to waste 48 hours of our time, rather than getting this done so we can get back to our jobs.
Ms. Jansen is quite right. I sometimes wonder if the government is not just covering up the WE scandal here with this endless filibuster but also doesn't want any scrutiny of this grand reset that the Prime Minister is now talking about, this idea that he is going to renovate Canadian society to fit his “Trudeaupian” ambitions. This is not a time to re-engineer society to his liking or his socialist ideology.
This is a time to get people safely and securely back to work, to protect their lives and livelihoods, not a time for government to take advantage of the crisis in order to massively expand its powers at the expense of Canadians' freedom. That's what we should be talking about here in the finance committee. We should be standing up against government power grabs like this grand reset the Prime Minister is discussing.
I'm beginning to wonder if this filibuster is about more than just covering up the WE scandal, and also about covering up the government's grand schemes for social and economic engineering, to cover up the power grab that he has lusted over since the beginning of this crisis. Frankly, we've lost patience. We want an answer. We want to get on with the job.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
