Evidence of meeting #34 for Health in the 43rd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was documents.
A recording is available from Parliament.
The Clerk of the Committee Ms. Evelyn Lukyniuk
I'm being told that it's fine from the interpretation booth.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
It's very difficult to hear Monsieur Desilets, because his voice in French is coming in on the English channel at a higher level than the translation is. It should be coming in at a lower or a subdued level.
Maybe we'll suspend for a couple of minutes and get this sorted out.
Bloc
Luc Desilets Bloc Rivière-des-Mille-Îles, QC
I'll keep going. This will be very brief.
Like a number of my fellow members, I agree with Mr. Fisher's amendment to strike the emails from the requested documentation. It seems to me that the information collected could serve both committees. That would simply be a more efficient use of public servants' time when searching for the information.
That's all I have to say. My apologies for the technical glitches. I'll try to keep my comments to a minimum today.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Thank you, Monsieur Desilets.
Your sound is good, as far as I'm concerned, and the interpretation is working, so feel free to intervene as much as you need to.
That being said, is there any more discussion on this amendment?
Seeing none, I will ask the clerk to conduct the vote. The vote is on the amendment to remove “emails” and to make grammatical corrections or adjustments to the motion as may be appropriate.
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
Mr. Chair, on a quick point of order, I believe that, for the clerk, who is new to our committee and doing a fantastic job so far, usually it starts with the government side and then goes to our side, in terms of votes. At least that's the precedent we've set at this committee. Perhaps we could clarify that.
Thanks.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Thank you.
(Amendment agreed to: yeas 6; nays 5 [See Minutes of Proceedings])
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
We're back to the main motion, which has now been amended to remove “emails” from the request. Is there any further discussion on the main motion as amended?
Mr. Fisher, please go ahead.
Liberal
Darren Fisher Liberal Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS
Mr. Chair, I want to know, based on what Mr. Jeneroux said there, if we could ask the clerk for clarification. I've been on multiple committees where it's gone back and forth at different times. I know that in the health committee we've always started with the government side, but is this something that we need to do?
Liberal
The Clerk
We can do it in different ways, depending on the committee. We can also do it alphabetically with all the members. With the virtual committees, I think we are readjusting ourselves. But if the committee has the practice of calling the government side first, I'm happy to continue with that practice.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Thank you.
Mr. Fisher, do you have a further intervention? l see that your hand is still up.
Liberal
Darren Fisher Liberal Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS
No, my hand just didn't come back down.
I don't really have a problem with the way we did it. Whenever we did it that way, I thought back to my past committees, and it seemed strange that we always did it in that particular way. I wasn't sure whether that was a precedent we had set, or whether it was just a thing based on different clerks. It's all good.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Thank you, Mr. Fisher.
Is there any further discussion on the main motion as amended by Mr. Fisher?
Mr. Fisher, please go ahead.
Liberal
Darren Fisher Liberal Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS
Mr. Chair, on the past few motions at this committee, we talked about adding the vetting line, so I will move now to add at the end of that motion:
, provided that the government does its assessment and vetting in gathering and releasing the documents as it would be done through the access to information process.
Liberal
Darren Fisher Liberal Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS
I could speak to that for a quick second.
A lot was said at the last committee meeting about how we ended up with a motion that had more redactions than the committee was happy with. I have the wording here of the motion we used, and I'll put it out there for the committee's thoughts. It seems more like what we did last Monday when MP Kwan amended the motion and we had come to an agreement with that and passed that, but this is the wording that gave us the response that was more redacted than we wanted, which was what led us to move forward with Conservative vetting language from previous committees. This was what we had passed back in the day that provided less volume or detail than we'd wanted:
that matters of Cabinet confidence and national security be excluded from the request; and that any redactions to protect the privacy of Canadian citizens whose names and personal information may be included in the documents, as well as public servants who have been providing assistance on this matter, be made by the Office of the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel of the House of Commons.
That's the wording we used that gave us the documents that we felt were more heavily redacted. We felt the wording provided—that the department would do its assessment and vetting and gathering and releasing of the documents as would be done through the access to information process, a process passed by Parliament—made more sense and would likely give us more of what the motion is seeking. I know Mr. Jeneroux loves it when I read Conservative motions into the record, which I won't do now, but we've seen that passed at various committees with that wording, so I will move that amendment.
Liberal
Sonia Sidhu Liberal Brampton South, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm saying this because of the assumption that we want transparency on this issue. We want to know exactly what happened in our long-term care homes, for example. We want to get all the information possible. I have one long-term care home in my riding. We want to protect privacy and the information coming out of the CAF report. That is why I support Mr. Fisher's comment.
Liberal
Liberal
Marcus Powlowski Liberal Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
I too support the amendment, including the ATIP language. The OGGO committee voted in favour of including the ATIP provisions, and I think all parties agreed with that. I too have concerns about overly redacted documents. I think democracy in a nutshell is that the unelected bureaucrats are held accountable to the elected individuals—us—and we too are then held accountable to the population in an election.
Certainly to have that accountability you need to have transparency. Having said that, I think there are actually some genuine, good reasons for excluding some information and not making some of it public. An example is personal information that could be detrimental to individuals. Especially this is going to be more of the case when it comes to the motion on chronic care homes, but there is also information relating to our relationship with the provinces. There may be some sensitive information there. In managing this pandemic, I think we have had good relationships with the provinces. I think we want to continue to have good relationships, and we don't want to jeopardize that by forcing ourselves to reveal all documents, some of which potentially may affect our relationships with the provinces, and that is included in the ATIP provisions.
The ATIP provisions seem to me to be reasonable. Now, if it comes back that it's overly redacted, then I agree with the opposition. This is a change from the previous February motion, and hopefully this will give us better results in terms of not overly redacted documents.
Liberal
Conservative
Matt Jeneroux Conservative Edmonton Riverbend, AB
I would certainly agree to amend it to be similar to what our motion was last week. However, and again so committee members are clear, this is what happened in February: The government chose to redact certain portions of it. The motion that passed last Monday was that the Office of the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel was provided the opportunity to provide those redactions for privacy concerns and a variety of others. I would certainly be amenable to changing the motion to be similar to last Monday's motion, but this motion certainly doesn't achieve what the government is saying it intends to achieve.
NDP
Don Davies NDP Vancouver Kingsway, BC
Thank you.
For the sake of completeness, there are some important points of information to follow up Mr. Fisher's point which, I'm afraid, leaves an extremely misleading impression to this committee that it was the wording of the motion back in February that led to heavily redacted information. That is not true.
He did read out the motion that we made back on February 26, which instructed that the committee order all documents subject to redaction for the points that Mr. Fisher raised. The motion did restrict redaction to protect privacy of Canadian citizens and did make the other points.
However, what is being left out is from the letter we received after that from Mr. Dufresne, the law clerk and parliamentary counsel, dated March 20, which was sent to our clerk of the committee, Mr. Jacques. I'm going to quote from that letter:
On March 15, 2020, the Deputy Minister of Health Canada provided the Committee with documents in response to its production order for the departments of Health, Transport, Global Affairs, Public Safety and National Defence. A letter accompanying the documents stated that redactions had been made to protect personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act, and that redactions had also been made “to avoid injury to international relations as well as relations with the provinces and territories; to protect information considered advice to a Minister; for the protection of government assets; and, to protect solicitor-client privilege.”
The letter goes on to say:
These latter grounds for exemption from disclosure are contained in the Access to Information Act.
I'm going to pause here and just say this: The grounds for redaction are much broader under the Access to Information Act than they are in what we had instructed as the three criteria in our original letter, which were privacy, national security and cabinet confidence. The problem was that the department violated the instructions of this committee back in February and applied the ATIP criteria, which is what resulted in the extensive heavy redactions.
I'm going to go on to quote from the law clerk's letter to our committee:
Upon reception of the documents on March 15, 2020, you provided them to my Office so that we could make the necessary redactions to protect the privacy of Canadian citizens, permanent residents and public servants as contemplated by the production order. However, as mentioned above, the documents had already been redacted by the respective departments.
As my Office has not been given the opportunity to see the unredacted information, we are not able to confirm or adopt those redactions. My Office did make one additional redaction to the documents regarding a public servant.
It goes on to refer to a meeting:
During that meeting, we reminded the government officials that the House's and its committees' powers to order the production of records is absolute and unfettered as it constitutes a constitutional parliamentary privilege that supersedes statutory obligations. We added that the House and its committees are the appropriate authority to determine whether any reasons for withholding the documents should be accepted or not; and that it was for the Committee to determine whether it was prepared to accept any proposed measures that would prevent the disclosure of sensitive information for any reason.
I'm going to stop there. Here is the actual fact of the matter: We can't have departments—civil servants—deciding what they want to redact or not redact. That is truly having the fox guard the henhouse.
If the Liberal members of this committee actually believe in the words they are saying and do believe, as Mr. Powlowski just said, that it's for elected officials to hold public servants accountable and not the other way around, then we need to insist that unredacted information come to this committee, and that it's for us, not civil servants, to determine whether information should be protected or redacted or whether it should go to the law clerk in unredacted fashion for the law clerk—not civil servants, whose very information may be the subject of embarrassment or may be information we want to get—to make that determination.
I think it's very important to clarify Mr. Fisher's comments. I don't want to leave the impression that we had such heavily redacted information back in February because we limited redaction to the three criteria; it was, in fact, the department's violation of this committee's instructions and adoption of ATIP, the broader ATIP redaction criteria, that caused that result.
If this committee does really believe, as Ms. Sidhu just said and Mr. Powlowski, Mr. Fisher and Mr. Kelloway said.... If the Liberal members of this committee do believe that it's for this committee to get to the bottom of the issues that are the subject of Mr. Jeneroux's motions and to have information for us to hold the civil service accountable, then we will limit redactions to the three bases that already are totally justified: privacy of individuals, national security and cabinet confidences, we will stipulate that information should not be redacted by any department beyond those three criteria, and then that the information should be sent to the law clerk. Actually, information should all be sent to the law clerk, and the law clerk should be redacting according to those criteria.
The members of this committee need to be absolutely crystal clear that ATIP criteria for blocking information are far wider. Perhaps I can ask the clerk to specify to all of the members of this committee what the criteria are in the access to information process so we know exactly what grounds are used to redact information under ATIP requests before we apply that standard in this committee.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.