Evidence of meeting #34 for Health in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was study.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Thank you.
Got it. I will speak a little more slowly.
Liberal
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Thank you.
I will continue: “‘Canada Health Infoway told The Globe last week it was working on the committee's request but had to sort through a large volume of records and had concerns about secure transmission of files.’
“The committee report to the House its view that the Standing Committee on Health should immediately undertake a full public investigation into the PrescribeIT program, including its costs, contracts, governance, performance and federal oversight.”
That is the motion, Mr. Chair.
Providing that verbal notice of motion underlines the argument that we're making in the context of this amendment.
To put those things together, the current business of the committee is a motion from Dr. Eyolfson regarding a potential study of the committee on HIV. As Conservative members have noted, we are supportive of the concept of doing this study, recognizing that many studies have been done in the past on HIV and that the committee would likely be drawing on an existing body of work and various studies that have been undertaken by various experts in various jurisdictions. I don't know that a parliamentary committee would be likely to reveal anything dramatically new on this subject in a study we would do as parliamentarians, as opposed to experts on the science of this.
That being said, Conservatives are supportive of doing this study, and we're also supportive of continuing the work that the committee is doing on various other issues. That work includes work on health care and immigration. It includes work on—
Conservative
Helena Konanz Conservative Similkameen—South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.
Conservative
Conservative
Helena Konanz Conservative Similkameen—South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Could you tell us what the speaking list is?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Sukh Dhaliwal
Yes. We have Mr. Mazier, Madame Konanz and then Madame Chi, so there are a lot of people.
Conservative
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Sukh Dhaliwal
We don't have much time, so we should not interrupt Mr. Genuis.
Please continue.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Thank you.
I have a few more points I want to put on the record, but members who are waiting to speak next will, I think, be wondering about when we'll go on to the next phase, and we'll see. It may depend on whether there are votes again in the House, because that has seemed to be a fairly common occurrence lately.
The spacing that I have proposed in the context of my amendment is to say that, yes, we'll proceed with the HIV study but that instead of having that study take place at every single meeting, we will have that study take place at every second meeting. That will create the space for the committee to continue with studies of other matters, one of which is PrescribeIT.
On the issue of PrescribeIT and the study the committee is going to do on that, I think some of those in-between meetings could be used for some further discussion of the subject matter of this article that I have included in this notice of motion and, really, of the absurdity of the arguments being used to justify the non-transmission of records.
This is a principle that, for whatever reason, various government institutions have had a surprising problem in understanding. However, it's a foundational principle of our constitutional order, which is that parliamentary committees are not just committees of parliamentarians. A committee is not just a group of parliamentarians sitting around a table and talking about issues that they want to talk about. A parliamentary committee meeting has a distinctly different character. If all of us who are meeting right now as part of the health committee were to separately decide that we were going to get together in a room and talk about health care, but not under the official auspices of the health committee, it would not be the same. It would be a very different reality.
The easiest way to explain this is by stating the fact that parliamentary committees have a character similar to that of a court. When they make decisions, they exercise specific powers that are necessary for those committees to do their work. The same principle applies in a court. There are specific offences that relate to conduct that shouldn't happen in court. There are specific requirements around the form that action takes in court, and courts are able to order certain things to take place, things which someone wouldn't be able to order outside of those proceedings. Our system invests the official action through those fora with specific powers, and the same is true of parliamentary committees.
The structure and the form are not exactly the same, but the principle is that committees are not just places where important policy discussions happen. They are also places where powers delegated by the House of Commons are definitively exercised, and those include the ability to subpoena witnesses and to send for documents.
In my time as a member of Parliament, I've been through many different situations—and this is another one—in which institutions make up fantastical excuses to justify not handing over documents. They will claim in some cases, for instance, that they are bound by the Privacy Act or that they don't want to because it would cause some problem for them.
Well, the Privacy Act has provisions in it that exempt situations in which documents are lawfully ordered by a body with the authority to do so. That exception clearly applies to parliamentary committees. Moreover, the constitutional principle of the supremacy of Parliament predates and supersedes any statutes that would be used as an excuse not to hand over documents.
To hear the excuses that we're hearing from Canada Health Infoway for not being accountable—
Liberal
Conservative
Dan Mazier Conservative Riding Mountain, MB
I was listening to Mr. Genuis and wondering how the chair plans on getting the documents from Canada Health Infoway that they're not willing to hand over.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Sukh Dhaliwal
I will address that.
Let me go back to Mr. Genuis.
Mr. Genuis, please continue.
Conservative
Dan Mazier Conservative Riding Mountain, MB
Really, if they're not handing them over, do we have to summon them? How are you going to do it?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Sukh Dhaliwal
I know the procedure, and you know the procedure, as vice-chair. We will follow that.
Mr. Genuis, please go ahead.
Conservative
Conservative
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Thank you, Chair.
In the course of what I was saying, as part of the committee's work on the PrescribeIT scandal, it does have the power to order witnesses to appear. It can't order the appearance of members of Parliament or government ministers. Only the House, as a whole, can do that, but committees can order the appearance of other individuals before it to answer questions.
I've been part of processes at other committees—processes involving IT procurement issues—in which witnesses have been ordered to appear. I've also seen cases in which orders have been made for the production of documents, the documents haven't been handed over, various excuses have been used and then that has been escalated. The head of the Public Health Agency of Canada was summoned to the bar to be admonished by the Speaker in a process that came out of the Canada-China committee. That resulted, initially, not so much from a failure to hand over documents but rather from a brazen refusal to answer direct questions from members of Parliament. I had asked him for some information.
The point is that the people at Canada Health Infoway, I'm sure, have some familiarity with how these events have unfolded in the past, yet they're continuing with this brazen decision not to hand over documents. To use the excuse that they are worried about the secure transmission of files is quite rich.
I've been on committees in the past in which.... Committees generally exercise these responsibilities in very thoughtful and judicious ways. There have been times when committees have ordered documents of a sensitive nature, and they've put a series of parameters around how those documents are viewed and distributed. The normal thing is that committee documents are distributed by email to everyone on the committee's distribution list, but it is certainly within the powers of the committee to say, “Okay, we have some sensitivity here in these documents, so—
Liberal
Maggie Chi Liberal Don Valley North, ON
I'm curious. I think Mr. Genuis was talking about the amendment. Now, I'm a little....
I don't know if you're still on the amendment or back on the motion that you introduced. You're talking about production of documents now.
Conservative