I just want to make sure that we're clear on a few things.
I know there's some conversation about the issue itself that we've outlined, but listening to my colleague from the NDP, I just want to clarify—because he's used the expression a few times—that these documents don't need to go to the House. They can just stay here in committee. Just to be crystal clear, this motion calls for the committee to receive these documents, not for these documents to be tabled in the House or delivered to the House.
All that would go to the House, as this motion is written, is kind of one thing for sure and one thing if necessary. The thing that would happen for sure if this motion is adopted is that the chair will present a report to the House notifying the House that this motion has been adopted. It's just an FYI. It doesn't automatically come with a debate. He would just get up during routine proceedings and table the report.
I don't see how that uses up House time or committee time. We've been in the House before when chairs table reports—sometimes it takes a few seconds. There's nothing that would automatically flow from that, so I don't see how (g) would be a procedural problem for anybody. It's very innocuous. Reports come from committees on a near daily basis.
That brings us to (h):
in the event the documents have not been produced as ordered by the Committee, to the Chair’s satisfaction, the Chair shall be instructed to present as soon as possible a further report to the House recommending that an Order of the House do issue for the foregoing documents....
That is really the crux of this. It would ensure that the government must comply. Again, Parliament is the body that holds the government to account. It's our job to shine a light on everything from how taxpayers' dollars are spent to what kinds of agreements were contained in this and whether or not, in fact, there were safeguards protecting Canadian jobs.
That is the step that's included here—to save committee time, to anticipate a possibility that would be in contempt of the committee and, in one tidy motion, to provide for a course of action in the event that the government ignores this motion.
If all goes well, if the government respects the democratic expression of this committee in terms of the adoption of this motion, we'll never need paragraph (h). It will never come into play. The report to the House saying that the government has defied an order of the committee will never need to be made because they will have respected it.
In the event that they don't respect that, I hope my NDP colleague would agree with us that it would be an affront to this committee. It would be an affront to the principle of parliamentary accountability, an affront to the taxpayers who are paying for this and an affront to the qualified Canadian workers who are being left out in the cold as taxpayer-funded foreign replacement workers fill the jobs that their tax dollars went to create in the first place.
I implore my NDP colleague not to think that somehow this motion should not be supported because it anticipates a potential problem and solves for it. In the event that this motion is ignored in the first place, I would hope that he would fight for his rights as a member to have committee decisions respected and would vote to support a version of (h) anyway.
Let's just deal with this all at once. We've been talking about this for a little over an hour now. I know there's a lot of business before this committee, and there are lots of issues that we should be seized with. Let's take care of this. This is an ultra-efficient motion that will save the committee time down the road, and it will save the House time as well if the government ignores us. If the government doesn't ignore this motion, then there's no problem, and life will can go on.