Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I would respectfully disagree with the connation that this motion would aggravate a situation. We find ourselves in a situation that's already been aggravated.
When a committee sends a summons, we expect that to be respected. We are the court of Parliament. We have the same constitutional rights and privileges in many ways that courts of law have to compel people and papers to be before this committee.
It's not as if we invited the folks at GC Strategies a couple of weeks ago and we just haven't heard back from them yet. There were two official summons with timelines attached to them that have been completely ignored. That is an affront to the role that Parliament plays in holding governments to account on behalf of Canadians, especially on behalf of taxpayers, when we're talking about what the government has done with the money that they forcibly remove from the hands of hard-working Canadians.
When Canadians have questions about why costs went from $80,000 to $60 million, why proper protocols weren't followed and why decisions were made with no oversight and what the Auditor General has described as an accountability void, then it's up to us to dig into that. It's not just something that we can choose to do; this is our obligation. This is the responsibility that we have as parliamentarians.
There are many examples of the House of Commons using precisely this tool, the power to take someone into custody with the purpose of compelling testimony. It doesn't happen every other day. There are no routine proceedings for it, because it doesn't usually happen. Usually people comply, whether they're government officials, stakeholders or literally anybody.
I can read some into the record. I have half a dozen or so examples. Most recently, Speaker Milliken, my predecessor—some of us served under Speaker Milliken—was presented with a situation where there was a witness in an investigation, and it was not clear whether or not they were going to come. The initial request was not honoured, so the Speaker issued a warrant for that witness to appear. That was in 2007.
There's an example in 1913 where a witness who had refused to answer questions before the public accounts committee was ordered to appear at the bar of the House and was taken into custody for his failure.
What we're talking about here are not penalties. It's not necessarily with the view of punishment for failing to apply. It's simply just to get the witnesses to appear so that these questions can be answered and information provided to Canadians.
As for doing this in multiple steps, I really do believe that this has been going on for quite some time. Again I go back to the point that we're not just proposing this because of events or decisions or the lack of appearances one or two weeks ago. Alarm bells were raised around this app, around the ArriveScam program, some time ago. We've had testimony going back months. We had an Auditor General's report that was delivered last week, and we've had now since December these two individuals refusing to appear.
We could have skipped the first part about a third invitation. We could have gone right to the ordering of the Sergeant-at-Arms, because we already know that they've ignored the request, but we want to have one more invitation, and we want these individuals to come within 14 days of the adoption of this order.
This is, to me, the perfect time to do this in this way to ensure that there is a deadline for them to appear with an automatic triggering of a process should they not. This committee has a right, parliamentarians have a right, for their summons to be respected and honoured. These two individuals haven't. They have already ignored those requests. What we're saying is, let's give them 14 days from the adoption of this order to show up and answer these questions, and if not, let's immediately move into the part of the process where we exercise our right on behalf of the Canadians, on behalf of taxpayers, to ensure the presence of people who have been paid by government dollars, by taxpayers' money, who have submitted invoices.
The Auditor General has major questions around it. She told the committee this morning that documents around the decision-making process either didn't exist or were destroyed. That's unbelievable. We need to find out this part of the story. We need to have this information for us to know who is to be held responsible for that, and these two individuals are key to this. They are key central players from the main company that contracted this out.
I respectfully disagree with the connotation that this is some kind of a massive escalation. We are here because of an escalation and twice ignoring of committee summonses. It is time that we move very quickly to get these individuals before this committee. I believe that automatically triggering a process in the House saves this committee time, it saves the House time and it will allow us to get to the answers much more quickly.