Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank my colleague and friend Mr. Johns for advancing, I think, a very legitimate point.
I think, Mr. Chairman, that I also accept responsibility. When we created this list of documents, this incredibly wide-ranging list of documents, I never in my life thought that McKinsey would be producing 91,000 pages and that the government would be responsible for producing multiple times that, and what the costs were in terms of manpower hours going into finding everything and producing it and the cost of translation both for the government and at the translation bureau.
This is an incredible amount of production that in the end I don't think was really warranted in any way. Having listened to the witnesses from McKinsey and having looked at what we've received, I don't see that there's a smoking gun there that really required this level of scrutiny by this committee.
What I think, Mr. Chair, is that we all can learn a lesson from this, which is that.... In the same way, at the public accounts committee, which we were both talking about here, a specific number of vaccine contracts were requested. There was a clear reason for requesting those specific contracts. Here, it wasn't requesting specifics. It was a random request for production, hoping that something would be found in hundreds of thousands of documents. I think the committee and all committees should learn a lesson from this and do better in terms of trying to narrow the focus of what should be received.
I agree with what Mr. Johns said. I think the correct approach should be to bring here the most egregious violators and the departments that were disrespectful of official languages—ESDC and whichever others the analysts would identify as being the three or four worst violators—to talk about official languages and the respect for official languages, and those who redacted the most or refused to provide documents to explain their rationale and to defend it before an entire committee in public. I think that would be the correct approach, as opposed to referring this to the House, where I can see many hours and days of lost time in dealing with this issue, as opposed to dealing with legislation and the budget.
Mr. Chair, that would be my position at this point. I don't support Mr. Barrett's motion, but I will support other motions to do the two things I've mentioned, which are to bring witnesses before us to explain themselves—and we can take whatever action we want after we hear from those witnesses—and to support Mr. Johns' request for an accounting of what has been spent in light of the production request.
Thank you.