I appreciate that, Mr. Chair, and I appreciate the point of order.
However, that is the issue. The heart of the issue is transparency. The government has a history in this committee, and quite frankly with the Winnipeg labs as well, of ignoring production of documents motions.
So yes, we're skeptical that the government will actually comply with a nice motion that doesn't include these things. “Trust us. Don't worry. We've made sure that they're secret in the industry committee, but we don't want them to go public here. We're going to maybe ignore this, using the excuse from government members that it's already in another committee and nobody will be able to talk about it publicly. Let's just sit down to see how that goes and ignore what this committee does.”
They have the out here, of course, with the French translation. I'm sure it will take them an awful long time, with the 100,000 new bureaucrats since they were elected, to actually translate these documents.
The issue is that they will use every trick in the book to not produce these documents. They did not vote to have these public at the industry committee; in fact, they voted the opposite, to keep them secret. That's what the members of the government, the Liberal side, are trying to do here today, to make them secret.
For everybody, for all Canadian taxpayers, it's important to know whether what the minister said when he announced this deal in the spring or what he said this weekend...which version of the truth it is that the contract supports.
There's only one way to do it, which is to produce them. The problem is that we don't trust that the government is going to do that because of their history.
In paragraph (g), which says that the chair will be instructed “to present a report to the House...advising that it has adopted this motion”, it's important, obviously, that the House be aware, through the work of this committee, that these documents have been requested. It's important, given the track record of this government, that all 338 members of the House of Commons are aware that this committee has asked for these documents to be made public, and that if they're not made public, there will be a report back to those same elected members of Parliament that they have refused, once again, to produce documents as compelled by a House of Commons committee and have ignored the will of Parliament.
Mr. Chair, I'll leave it there on this amendment for now. Thank you.