Government Operations Committee on April 17th, 2023

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Good afternoon, everyone. I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 60 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, a.k.a. the mighty OGGO and also known as the only committee that matters.

I have a few things to go through first before we start recognizing folks. If you're sitting at home enjoying this, please like and subscribe to the OGGO channel.

Pursuant to the motion adopted by the committee on Wednesday, March 22, the committee is meeting today to discuss committee business. I have a few things I need to go over first. They're all non-controversial, simple ones, but we need guidance for scheduling matters and other issues.

The first one is the President of the Treasury Board is available to come to the committee for the main estimates on May 3.

I see everyone's perfectly fine with that. Thank you very much.

Another issue, just going back to ArriveCan, is that the Auditor General is studying ArriveCan as well. I would like committee's approval that we make all of the ArriveCan documents, the unredacted ones, available to her office so she does not have to go through the whole process and the cost of getting the documents as well.

Are we fine with that?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

I suspect, when the time comes, we'll ask the same for the McKinsey ones, but that she's doing ArriveCan first is my understanding.

We have a couple of budget items to go over. The budgets have been distributed by the clerk. The first one is Bill C-290, an act to amend the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act. It's $14,000, but because it's all internal—I think the witnesses are all going to be in person—I don't think we'll spend any of it. However, we need the committee's approval for that.

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Perfect. Thank you very much.

The second one is for the main estimates, 2023-24, study. It's $3,000. It's the same thing. It's all internal people, but we need that approved.

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Excellent.

The third one is the never-ending shipbuilding study. Because of the dates around what we approved for the last one, I need committee's approval for the clerk to redraft a new budget by May 19. This will just be a backstop in case we decide to travel from July to December. We're just updating the numbers from the last time around. Are we all fine with that?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Wonderful.

Now, before we get to anyone else, I'm going to turn things over to Diana who's going to give us a brief on the updated report.

[Diana Ambrozas, Committee Researcher]

Hello.

There were a number of changes that you requested we make to the report, a handful of them. The first one is that we are proposing a title, which is to be more in line with other similar reports in the House. The title proposed is “Question of Privilege on Providing Documents to the Committee.”

Another change we made was, since the last report, another department, ESDC, finished their submission, so we updated the number of departments that had not completed.... The number that have not completed is now eight instead of nine, and we updated the date of that to April 6.

We also removed the annex because that, again, is not a normal procedure in a report to the House. It doesn't really have any extra information that the House needs to make a finding of contempt or lack of privilege.

Then, we added several paragraphs from Ms. Vignola's motion about the quality of the French-language documents. We singled out three organizations: Canada Post, Public Sector Pension Investment Board and ESDC. The first two submitted unverified AI translations, quite openly. They acknowledged that's what they did. ESDC had English pages where French pages should have been submitted. There were a number of English pages in the French version of the document. When they resubmitted it, with all the extra 227 pages, those English pages were still there.

Then finally, we added an explicit statement that we would like to draw a breach of privilege to the House at the very end.

That's it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you, Diana.

Now, I see a couple of people already, but I have to mention a couple of things.

The motion from Mr. Barrett under consideration was:

That the clerk of the committee send further correspondence to the departments to have them comply with the order from the committee; and that those departments who do not comply with the committee’s order by Wednesday, April 12, 2023, be reported to the House.

That is the outstanding motion, but I have to rule it out of order because obviously the date has passed. That was from March 29. We're past that date. Given that the proposed motion is no longer valid, I rule the motion out of order. If there are any motions for the draft report....

I see Mr. Barrett, and then Mr. Johns.

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I appreciate the work the analysts undertook over the course of the last two weeks. We received this halfway through the last week, so they did it with two fewer working days than they would normally have—the Good Friday and Easter Monday holidays, which I hope they were able to take while preparing this.

I'd like to draw attention to the section on the disregard for the requirement for ESDC to properly respect their obligations to provide documents in both official languages. That is a critical component of the breach of privilege that occurred here. Of course, we hear the terms “breach of privilege” and “contempt”, and sometimes they are used haphazardly. When it comes to the power of a committee to send for persons and papers, that is not negotiable, though we have negotiated and given multiple opportunities. Those dates are very carefully, meticulously outlined in this report. The same is true with respect to the attention paid to the disregard for the obligation to respect both official languages. I don't need to give anyone lessons on minority language rights, but it sounds as if someone needs to give a lesson to ESDC on minority language rights.

That's why I move that the seventh report, as tabled by the analysts today, be adopted and reported to the House.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Thank you, Mr. Barrett.

I'm sorry. Is that as amended? Just to verify....

[Michael Barrett, Conservative, Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, ON]

Indeed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Mr. Johns, you had your hand up after Mr. Barrett. Was it on this issue or was there something else?

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

I had a motion I was going to move, but it sounds as if there's a motion on the floor.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Okay.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Mr. Chair, perhaps you can help us, actually, while I have the floor.

Have you checked to see how much money we've spent in this committee to get these documents, or does the clerk have a rough estimate of how much money we've spent? It's a lot of documents. We're talking thousands of pages of documents from departments, and it takes time. We know that. It's evident that five weeks was not enough time for what we were requesting, given the limited resources the government has, especially the translation bureau. I completely support what Mr. Barrett said around respecting minority rights, as well as Ms. Vignola's concerns. They are all of our concerns. The quality of translation is completely unacceptable. When our office has ATIP requests, they often take months to get back, even for just a small number of documents, let alone tens of thousands of pages, even in their original language and not translated.

Can you share whether you—or the clerk—have a ballpark figure of how much money has been spent to get access to these documents? Are we into the tens of millions of dollars, right now?

I don't want us to be spending more money getting these documents and getting them translated than McKinsey got in contracts from the federal government. I want to be mindful of taxpayers' dollars and where we're going. Initially, this whole study started with concerns there was a link from the government to McKinsey. Later, it became about McKinsey and their connection to the toxic drug crisis. Now, it's about parliamentary privilege. I'm not saying these aren't valid concerns, but I am concerned about the time this committee is spending, where we're going with this and the amount of resources we're spending.

I take my part of the responsibility here, as well, on this committee. However, I'd like to get some idea of where we're going and how much money we've spent. It is important we get an idea, in order to make some sound decisions here at this table. I know our greater committee concern—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

Do you want me to actually address the question or are you going to—

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Sure.

Before you do that, I know that our committee's goal is to look at outsourcing as a whole. We need to get to that and I want to get to that. We're spending a lot of time on this.

Yes, if you could answer, that would be great.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kelly McCauley]

I don't have it, but you can submit an Order Paper question, I'm sure, and get the answer.

I'm not sure, Madam Clerk, if you would have a response.

[The Clerk of the Committee, Ms. Aimée Belmore]

I'm looking to see whether or not I have a response. I'm checking currently, but what I would ask for is clarification. Are you asking specifically about the McKinsey documents that the committee was obligated to translate or the greater documents that the government was also obligated to translate?

There are two streams of documents: one that arrived to us translated and one that the House of Commons or whatever person it comes out of is paying to translate. I'm just looking to see—

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

The translation is essential, so we have to do that.

[The Clerk]

Absolutely.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

I guess both. It would be good to get an idea of what we're spending overall right now on this study, on this motion.

Maybe, Madam Clerk, you can also share.... I have been on committees for years. I have never seen a committee ask for this volume of documents.

Mr. Chair, you've been around for a while, so maybe you can share your—