Thank you, Mr. Chair.
First of all I want to clear up some of the misinformation and disinformation I've heard so far. The public accounts committee is not looking at this issue. It is seized with other issues. As I understand it, the industry committee is busy looking at the sustainable green fund scandal, the problems with Bill C-27—the privacy bill—and the Stellantis contract scandal, so it is also not looking at this.
I'm extremely concerned with the pattern of behaviour I see with medical contracts. We have this Medicago one, where clearly there were two contracts and there's been a $150-million payment to Mitsubishi that isn't mentioned anywhere in anything that we've seen, so that's questionable. This is on top of things like the Frank Baylis “let's spend $172 million to buy ventilators but never use them”. Then, where do we get the money back or sell those ventilators to do something...? These kinds of things are happening all the time.
When the ministers come we always hear that they didn't read their emails and they weren't aware of the details of the contract. There are electronic bank records that go with every one of these transfers, so I don't accept that we can't get to the bottom of where this is.
I would also call.... When the Liberals say they want to have transparency, but then they bring an amendment like what they've brought, which is to say, “Okay, you can come and look at it, but you can't take pictures of it and you can't record it.” That puts us in the situation where, yes, we see it, and as Mr. Davies has correctly said, we can talk about it. However, as soon as we say, “Well, the contract said this, and this is a problem”, then the NDP will line up, as they always do, with their Liberal partners and say, “No, it doesn't say that.” Again, the public has no way of knowing what the truth is because there's no transparency at all.
I propose a subamendment to the amendment that's been made. The subamendment would take out some of the wording within the amendment. It would be “that, when these documents are received by the clerk, they be available to committee members no later than 30 days following the receipt of the contracts.” That would be it.
I will mail that to the clerk so that he has it in both official languages.