Evidence of meeting #57 for Government Operations and Estimates in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was documents.
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Conservative
Kelly Block Conservative Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK
Yes, it's on the McKinsey documents. It's not on the study that we're actually doing.
I am fine with ending the motion at “Company”. However, my understanding is that the chair has reached the end of all the options he has in getting compliance from the individuals who have been submitting documents, that this will be part of our report and that the actual report that we adopt will be presented to the House. That's my understanding, which is why I would leave the wording as is and based on what has been put forward in motions before by the OGGO committee when there were issues like this before.
Liberal
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
I appreciate what my colleague is saying.
Kelly, I obviously understand. For me, though, until I understand the scope of it, I don't necessarily agree to refer it to the House. I need to understand the scope, which is why I'd like to see a report to the committee from the analysts that explains to us what's happened.
I do, however, want this to be done without my having to commit to it being submitted to the House.
If we send something to the House, it is a sanction, an indication that the committee is not satisfied. So I will not be prepared to accept that until I have all the facts.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Before I get to the others, can I just quickly...? There's just one thing.
The amount of effort that our clerk has put in—the amount of my time tied up with this—is significant. I am disappointed—I'm going to use that phrase because I don't want to use expletives—after the problems we've had with these departments, with the arrogance of saying that, no, they decide, not Parliament.
That being said, after chatting with the clerk, whether it says “House” or “committee”, the committee still has to decide to declare that it will be reported to the House.
Conservative
Michael Barrett Conservative Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON
A separate vote would determine that.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
It would be in the other way, as well. Would it not?
The clerk is saying that we'd have to approve the report anyway. I've gone through the documents. It's pretty straightforward. The departments have just said, “No, get lost. We don't believe in Parliament,” basically. They're saying they don't believe in the supremacy of Parliament. There's that.
There are other ones that have been redacted minorly, but it's almost beside the point. Our motion said “unredacted”. We've been very good with them that we won't make the items public. We've stated that we'll chat with them. We've offered to look at their suggested redactions before anything is done. We, as a committee, have bent over backwards for these departments, and they have just thrown it in our faces.
I'm trying not to get angry here over their refusal to comply with the very reasonable options that we've given them.
That being said, the clerk—and she knows this a lot better than I do—has said that, when it does come back, we still will have to, whether it's report to the House as ordered here or report to the committee, vote to send it to the House.
Aimée, if you want to explain it a bit more, I'm fine with that.
The Clerk
I don't honestly think there's much that I could add to that. Either way we would be bringing you, the members of the committee, the report. Whether it says we report to the committee or we report to the House, ultimately you, as a committee, would decide if that draft report is then reported to the House.
Whichever wording you prefer is your choice.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
However, we are at a standstill with these departments that have—
I will get to you, Mr. Kusmierczyk, Ms. Vignola and Mr. Johns.
We're at a standstill to get them to comply with the order. I will not say anything....
Mr. Kusmierczyk.
Liberal
Irek Kusmierczyk Liberal Windsor—Tecumseh, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Again, I want to go back to our instructions to the analysts. I want to make sure we're clear and that they understand what our expectations are in terms of what information we're going to ask them to deliver.
Could we maybe hear from the analysts to give an example of how they might approach this task of reporting back for us on the quantity and scale of the redactions? Would they just give us an idea, because, again, as I understand it, there are thousands of pages. I just want to make sure that we get information we can act on, but we're not overburdening our analysts on this.
Not to put you on the spot, but can we get a sense of how you might approach this?
Conservative
Ryan van den Berg Committee Researcher
I think our strategy with the way that the motion is currently worded would be to provide an overview of all of the documents provided to date, as well as at least the number of departments that have submitted redacted documents.
The time frame the committee has in mind could be a factor as well, so depending on how much detail the committee would like from us, we would be able to modify what we produce for you based on that.
Liberal
Irek Kusmierczyk Liberal Windsor—Tecumseh, ON
What level of specificity do we require? What level of quantification do we require? I just want to be clear—
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
I'm sorry, Mr. Kusmierczyk, but we've had a response. Ms. Vignola has been very patient with me so far.
Liberal
Bloc
Julie Vignola Bloc Beauport—Limoilou, QC
I completely understand why the members opposite are asking these questions.
I started looking at the documents, from one end to the other. There are some that we can read easily, even though they have been redacted. Only the personal details, like the person's name and phone number, have been redacted. That's all right, since that's what we had asked for.
However, there is an awful lot of material that we can't read. I am not even talking about the differences between the French and English documents; most of the French documents have been redacted. Indeed, they are illegible, and, I'm sorry to say, they have been poorly translated. It looks like the documents were translated not with Google Translate, but with Bing Translator. These are not good translation tools.
Of 500 pages, 495 were redacted; several pages are completely redacted. In my opinion, this is unacceptable, unless there really are 495 pages of names, addresses, phone numbers, and personal emails. There was a lot more information redacted than that.
We can do the timeline. We made our request at a specific time and asked to receive a response by a specific date. We were forced to put water in our wine, as we received nothing. Subsequently, we received a letter informing us that we would never receive a response. We also received another letter on another day. It's still pretty simple to do the timeline.
One way or another, it is up to us whether we bring this to the House. As parliamentarians, we represent thousands of people. In order to get to the bottom of an issue, on behalf of those people, we asked for information. We are either not given it or it is so blacked out that we are not even able to make out anything about the information. The best we can do with the information we are given is to give the paper to a child to use for origami or drawing. A blank sheet of paper is great for that.
The timeline doesn't work. We don't understand why they won't give us the documents and why they don't trust us. We said we would look at the documents privately and figure out what we were going to take away and what we were going to keep. We are not a bunch of clowns; we all have a head on our shoulders.
I understand that we need to be sure of what we want. We asked that the documents not be redacted. Yet they were quite blacked out, more than necessary. I think it is relatively clear. Doing the timeline is simple—maybe that's the history teacher in me talking. Doing the timeline is not very complicated, and we have all the documents and letters that allow us to do it.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kelly McCauley
Mr. Johns, we'll go to you.
The analysts have a simple suggestion and they can explain it. They said they can get something to us next week.
If you want to explain quickly, I think it's probably acceptable to everyone.
Committee Researcher
One option that we would propose to the committee is that we could have prepared, by next Wednesday, a more minimal list of at least which departments have submitted redacted or unredacted information, as well as some more qualitative information about the types of redactions they have made. However, if you want something that would be more detailed than that, it would require a little more time. We would probably need until the next meeting sometime in April to do that.
NDP
Gord Johns NDP Courtenay—Alberni, BC
Mrs. Block moved this motion. I would like to give her a chance to respond.
Conservative
Kelly Block Conservative Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, SK
I find it interesting that this motion calls for a brief report that simply asks for any material information. When I'm thinking about what we might expect from our analysts, I'm not thinking of a 10- or 15-page report. I'm thinking of something that outlines chronologically where we started, all of the requests, what we've received and, to some degree, why we're at the point where we are actually considering that a report go to the House. I think it's fairly evident in the motion that's in front of you. I completely understand why you do not want to have this conversation in public, but I think everything else is fairly self-explanatory.