Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I know I missed the riveting discussion at the last meeting over these issues, so I'll try to be succinct.
Committees have extensive powers of production for a reason. I've sat through a number of Parliaments and seen various governments approach to control committees. I know that the present Liberal government, since they won the election in 2015, has pledged on a number of occasions to restore the historic position of committees to fulfill our very important mandate to act and operate independently, and to be masters of our own business and affairs.
It would seem to me that if we start falling into the practice of always excluding emails from production, it would be completely, ridiculously and patently easy for any government to effectively avoid accountability to committees by simply putting all the information that they want, that is sensitive, into email form. That's number one.
There is nothing...and it defeats the very purpose of the committee's power to produce and compel documents, just like we can compel and produce witnesses. I think we all, as committee members, regardless of political stripe, have to take our responsibility seriously with respect to these powers and not fall into a practice that effectively lets any government of any stripe avoid its transparency and accountability to committees. That's exactly what would happen if we let them go and not produce emails.
Number two, as I've said before, frankly, I think emails are among the easiest things to gather because there are search functions on computers. It's way easier to get emails by putting in key search words than it is to gather paper, which really does require sometimes a Herculean search process through Ottawa as a number of civil servants have to search files and desks, etc. So I don't buy the argument that emails are difficult to get.
Third, these motions we're dealing with here are dealing with targeted issues. This is not opening up the entire civil service to produce all their emails; it's about emails that are related to specific issues, the N95 mask issue and the medical devices. I can't imagine that there are thousands of these emails. We're talking about hundreds, or maybe dozens.
I'm going to speak in favour of this. I'm always going to speak in favour of transparency and accountability. I think the government—any government—has a valid point to be careful and vigilant to ensure that this very special process that committees have isn't abused and that it doesn't create true and authentic bureaucratic nightmares. But I don't see that in this particular case, so I'm going to speak in favour of this, and I hope all of my colleagues do. The fact that this information is being gathered, I think, speaks to Mr. Jeneroux's point that the government is already gathering most of this information.
Finally, we haven't yet spoken on redaction. I'm going to repeat now, and early, that I was extremely disappointed with the extensive redaction that occurred, by I don't know who, to documents that this committee had requested before. Frankly, it was insulting to committee members that we were denied the ability to see documents and to read them in their fulsome form.
There should be only three reasons for redaction: privacy, cabinet confidences and national security. The only person who should be doing the redaction is the law clerk, or perhaps the clerk of this committee. I'll foreshadow what I anticipate will be the next amendment by the government, which is to try to restrict the information to ATIP or something else that has many, many criteria to it that I'm not even sure about. However, I've done enough ATIPs in my time to know that you get documents that come back with more black than you have words in them, and that defeats the purpose of holding the government accountable as well.
I'm going to speak in favour of the motion as it's currently written, and I urge my colleagues to do so.
Thank you.
