Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I spoke at the beginning when I introduced this motion, and now we have this amendment. I'd like to address the second part of the amendment, which concerns paragraph (h).
Actually, before I do that, perhaps I could address this issue in relation to the industry committee, as I believe I'm the only member of the industry committee who's here.
On the Volkswagen contract, our original request last year was for it to be released publicly, and the government amended it to make it secret so that we could only view it under in camera conditions. Our proposal last week for all of these contracts was to make it public, and the government amended the motion to keep them secret, to keep them behind. Contrary to the impression that was left that these documents will be made public, they will not be made public under what's going on at the industry committee, and they will not be made public to provide the clarity that the Liberal MP for Windsor—Tecumseh mentioned that he thinks all Canadians should have access to.
Of course, they should have access to it. The only way to have access and to clear up the confusion here is to deal with this and make them public. It was the Hon. François-Philippe Champagne who said at the start that all the jobs in construction and all the jobs that are permanent would be Canadian union jobs, which turns out not to be the case. How do we know that? It's because the ambassador for South Korea went to the community and met with officials and said they needed housing for 1,600 South Koreans who are coming here to work at the plant.
Paragraph (h), the document request that the Liberals are trying to remove, reads:
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, provided that they shall be laid upon the Table, in both official languages and without redaction, within one sitting day of the adoption of the Order and thereupon be deemed permanently referred to this committee.
So what the heck would that mean for everybody if the paragraph were removed? It would mean that the government would not produce these documents in spite of an order from this committee that this has to go to the House. That's in the event that the documents aren't produced. I don't see what the risk is of having this in the motion because if the government produces a document, then this is not necessary. But it's absolutely necessary in the case that the government does not produce the documents, because we know that the government was given eight weeks to produce the McKinsey documents for this committee and refused to do so on committee order.
Where did this committee end up? It had no ability to report back to the House given the way the government reacted. The government already has a history of ignoring document production requests. The member from Windsor—Tecumseh, as I understand it, was at the forefront of refusing and arguing that those documents not be produced. So, yes, there's a history of ensuring that we don't have transparency about the expenditure of taxpayer dollars. If he's so proud of these jobs and this initiative in his riding, he should be proud of the contract. He should be proud that the contract requires Canadian workers, which apparently it doesn't.
The question before us is, why would you want to hide this? The company, presumably, has the ability in the contract to take out the few bits of it they might think are commercially sensitive, but large parts of these contracts are not commercially sensitive because the Minister has talked in generalities about them before. But he's been very confused, because at the beginning he said that these would all be Canadian jobs, and then as recently as this weekend, the Hon. François-Philippe Champagne admitted that he didn't guarantee that the jobs would be for Canadians when he signed this $15 billion deal with Stellantis. Now he's saying he wants to sit down. That's the implication. Why would the minister need to sit down with Stellantis and NextStar to figure out what the job situation is of foreign workers if foreign workers were not allowed in this contract in such massive numbers—1,600 out of 2,500 workers.
He's contradicting himself. At the beginning, these were Canadian workers. Now he says that obviously he needs to sit down and clarify the contract that he signed—that perhaps he didn't read—and whether or not it allows us—