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.