Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I will try to be succinct. I have a few things I want to say, but I also want to get back to the witnesses who were called here today. We have many of them, and I think we should be using our time with the witnesses.
Mr. Chair, coming back to the question of.... Something really important was raised by my colleague, Madame Sinclair-Desgagné: Why, in the public accounts committee, was it okay to obtain unredacted copies of the vaccine contracts? Why did I work with her and with you, sir, to get those? It's because it was something that was reasonable. It was something that was tailored and targeted, and there was a mechanism put in place that everybody agreed with and that ensured everything was kept confidential. It wasn't a fishing expedition of thousands and thousands of documents at huge cost and huge effort that kept the bureaucracy tied up for months and cost millions of dollars for translation. There were very specific contracts.
I agree with the principle that committees should be able to get the documents they ask for and that they should be able to work out a way to get them in an unredacted way. I believe that very strongly. I think we should be looking into the current procedures being used by the Privy Council Office and the departments and rethink them and make suggestions, but I don't think that what we did here was well thought through at all. If I could go back, I wouldn't vote for the motion the way it was, because it was clearly much more wide-ranging than I think any of us really understood at the time—certainly me.
The second thing, Mr. Chair, is that we've had a lot of outrage about documents being shared with certain redactions. This motion was raised by once again referring back to an email that I now have asked for copies of twice and both times have been refused, an email that at the previous meeting was used to clearly suggest that this was written in June of this year and tied to the McKinsey documents. It was again raised in the questioning to the Privy Council Office as a precursor for this motion. As opposed to receiving it redacted or unredacted, this committee has not received it at all. It hasn't been shared, even though it's being relied upon as the reason why the motion was brought forward.
I find it outrageous that in the last meeting I was clearly misled to believe that this document was written as an email about McKinsey, when the person who allegedly wrote it has not been with the Privy Council Office this year, and that email that we keep talking about has not been shared with the rest of us.
Mr. Chairman, given that, I move that the debate on the motion be adjourned so that we can return to the witnesses.
Thank you.