I'm going to speak in support of this motion.
I do want to say to Mr. Van Bynen, and I say this with great respect, on several occasions over the past year I have urged the committee chair to make use of the subcommittee to schedule business. Today is Friday, May 28, and as of my coming to this meeting, there was no subcommittee meeting called.
This is the last day of the first round of topics of our COVID study. This motion was submitted by Ms. Rempel Garner more than two days ago. Everybody on this committee has had an opportunity to look at the motion. What it does is it simply seeks to make productive use of the remaining seven or eight meetings that we have.
With great respect, I raised this issue of calling a subcommittee meeting two weeks ago and it was not called. For a subcommittee meeting to be called today for Monday means that were we to accede to that, we would lose a committee meeting on Monday and then we would lose another meeting on Friday, because the subcommittee would meet, come to a decision, hopefully, and then that proposal would have to be adopted by the full committee. We would lose approximately 25% of the meetings that we have left before the House rises on June 23.
That is not an effective way to deal with committee business. I'm going to be a little more strenuous in my objection at the lack of effective and efficient scheduling and the use of the subcommittee on this basis. If the committee chair is not going to call subcommittee meetings to plan the business of this committee, one can hardly fault the members of this committee for taking the bull by the horns and doing it themselves, which Ms. Rempel Garner has done.
This motion is written very objectively. For the record, I want to state what it does. It schedules our PMPRB meeting on Monday, as Mr. Thériault is entitled to. It proposes that we have eight witnesses instead of four so that we effectively have the final two of the four meetings, which Mr. Thériault proposed and this committee passed, completed on Monday. We finish the committee business on PMPRB.
Starting on Friday of next week, and on every successive meeting but the following Monday, for the first hour of each meeting each party is allowed to submit one witness as they see fit on any issue under COVID. You can't get more egalitarian than that. In the second hour of each of those meetings, the deputy ministers will come to answer questions. I think this is an excellent way to structure the meeting because we are allowed to hear the witnesses as each party wants to call them, whether it's on long-term care or mental health, which I know is a priority of Mr. Van Bynen's. I know long-term care is a priority that Ms. O'Connell has mentioned. On whatever issue anybody wants, we can have those witnesses appear in the first hour and then, if questions or issues emerge, we can put them directly to the deputy ministers from health, from the Public Health Agency of Canada, from procurement, and the chief public health officer.
I think that's a very important way to proceed because were we not to come up with this process, we would have to then proceed with the next first priority of the Liberals. That's where we'd go back and we would never get to the next priorities of the other parties. We have the benefit right now of stopping at this point, having heard the number one priority from each of the four parties and having four meetings on each. You can't get more egalitarian than that and because we can't then go to the second choice of each party and hear from each of those in a fair way by the end of June, it's a very natural stopping point for us on how we are going to handle the final seven or eight meetings. This way allows every party to get the witnesses they want before each one of those meetings.
Finally, the other piece of it is that the meeting a week from Monday is the only other meeting that departs from the process I just described. This would be a meeting to hear from the law clerk and the Clerk of the Privy Council. I am going to make some pointed remarks about this.
Last October, the House of Commons—no less—passed a motion compelling—not asking—the government to produce documents in prescribed form on a number of subjects set forth in that motion. That was passed by the majority of the members of Parliament in the House of Commons. We live in a democracy. That is the democratic will of the House of Commons.
In that motion... at the time, my Liberal colleagues said they had resisted it because there would be over one million documents. By the way, I never understood how they got to that number. I think it was pulled out of thin air. Nevertheless, it was confirmed in writing by the Clerk of the Privy Council to this committee that they had in their possession over one million documents related to the motion that we called production for.
To date—seven months later—this committee has received just over 8,000 documents, while 992,000 documents remain in the possession of this government. Not only that, but this government refused to translate those documents, in my view, in direct violation of the law and of their obligation to provide documents in both official languages. This government dumped that responsibility onto the law clerk, who has no resources to do translation and had to use his budget to hire people specifically for the purpose of translating documents that this Liberal government refused to put in both official languages.
Not only that, but the first tranches passed over to the law clerk were a series of the most innocuous documents you could imagine—press releases and documents well in the public sphere.
I'll tell you my thesis. This government is deliberately stalling and withholding production of documents. There is no other conclusion any reasonable person can come to. In seven months, the law clerk has received 8,000 documents out of one million.
Moreover, I will say that this government, by the terms of the motion, does not have any right or responsibility to vet those documents, so they can't say they're doing any work on them. Their job is to identify the documents and fire them over to the law clerk.
We, specifically, in the House of Commons, said that the law clerk has the responsibility of doing the redacting and vetting according to the criteria we gave them. We did that specifically so that the government wouldn't hold up the process by redacting documents in advance. The government doesn't have to redact and they don't have to review. Their job is to find the documents and turn them over to the law clerk. The law clerk will then do the redacting according to the instructions.
I think it's entirely appropriate to have a meeting on Monday to hear directly from the law clerk and from the Clerk of the Privy Council about what the heck is going on. Parliament is supreme in our system—not the government, not the cabinet and not the Liberal caucus. Parliament is supreme, Parliament has demanded production of these documents, and we're not getting them.
To wrap up, this motion gives us the PMPRB study conclusion that this committee has already passed. It provides a fair structure for us to hear on a completely egalitarian basis from witnesses from each party on COVID, which is what Canadians want us to focus on. It calls the deputy ministers responsible to come and be answerable to this committee, as they should be. It provides one meeting so that we can deal with the issue of production of documents, which I believe is bordering on contempt of Parliament. Finally, it asks the Minister of Health to come to one meeting of her choosing on one of the Fridays between now and June 25.
How could anybody on any side of this committee object to that? To say, “Oh, no, we don't want to vote on this. We're going to filibuster or talk this out. I know, let's have a subcommittee meeting on Monday”, on Friday and then to waste two meetings the next week on it is, frankly, irresponsible.
Other committees might have their own business, but this is the health committee and we're in the middle of the biggest global health crisis that this country and this globe have seen in a century. We can't afford to miss meetings.
I think this motion is well structured, it's fair and it gives a very prescribed system for dealing with the last seven or eight meetings of this committee. I can't imagine anybody on this committee having a single valid objection to it. I will be supporting it.