Evidence of meeting #39 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was block.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
Marcel Proulx Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
Thank you.
Mr. Egan, your situation is somewhat different, but do you think the Canadian Gas Association would hire him?
12:30 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Gas Association
Mr. Ullyatt and I had spoken about his career prospects, and he sought my advice on same. I advised him I had no position to offer him. I do not believe the Canadian Gas Association will be offering him a position of any kind.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
Marcel Proulx Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
Mr. Egan, I just want to make sure I understood what you have repeated a few times.
Yes, I appreciate that you say you never asked for this report. Are you telling us that you never received the report?
12:30 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Gas Association
Yes, I am. I have—
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
Marcel Proulx Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
Sir, explain to me, please, and maybe you can't, that House of Commons IT records show that on November 18 at 4:53:37 p.m., out of the account from Mrs. Block's office—the same account that was used for the other messages—a message was sent to tegan@cga.ca. Is that your account, sir?
12:30 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Gas Association
That's correct. May I take a moment to explain?
12:30 p.m.
Mr.Timothy Egan
Yes, we do.
12:30 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Gas Association
Well, I don't know whether “confidential” is a term that's used for the blockage, but something worked, because the spam filter stopped the report.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
Marcel Proulx Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
I'm really curious. Please tell us briefly, because I only have a few minutes left.
12:30 p.m.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Gas Association
Mr. Chairman, I have an affidavit, which I swore on November 24, attached to which is a letter from our independent IT provider. The fact that someone had attempted to send me privileged information came to my attention on Monday, November 22, when I was contacted by the clerk of the finance committee. The clerk asked me to give him a call about this.
I spoke to the clerk. Mr. Rajotte was in the clerk's office. Mr. Rajotte advised me that I had received privileged information. I advised Mr. Rajotte that in fact I had not, and he said to me, “There is an e-mail that goes to your address”. I advised him that I had never received such e-mail. That was end of day on the Monday. On Tuesday we contacted our IT provider and had them do a search for the e-mail.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
Marcel Proulx Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
I'm sorry; we have a report from Workshift explaining that it was considered spam or that there was a filter for keywords in the e-mail. So it must have been a filter for...whatever.
Mr. Chair, before my time runs out, I would like to table some motions. We have 27 minutes left in this meeting. There will probably be time for us to go through this round and then come back. Do you want me to table them now or wait until afterwards?
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
I would like to finish this line of questioning. Committee business generally takes place at the end of the meeting. If you'd like, I'll try to save five minutes at the end for that.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
Marcel Proulx Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
Can I count on your cooperation to let me table these motions?
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
You know you can always count on my cooperation, Monsieur Proulx.
12:30 p.m.
Liberal
Marcel Proulx Liberal Hull—Aylmer, QC
I just want to confirm that this morning, so thank you. I appreciate it.
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
12:30 p.m.
Conservative
12:35 p.m.
Conservative
Ted Menzies Conservative Macleod, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you to our witnesses.
As I stated earlier, it is very troubling, going through this process, and there are a lot of integrity issues here. First of all, the integrity of members of Parliament has been jeopardized here. We have opposition members suggesting that Ms. Block has done something wrong. I will defend her. I think she's done everything right. She did it as quickly and as positively as she could.
That brings me to the credibility of our witnesses here today and their integrity. I'm going to put it in very simple terms. If you were walking down the street and saw an envelope lying on Wellington Street with “draft report” written on it, would you open it and share it? That's basically what you all got.
We're talking here a lot about e-mails. I just sent myself “pbcdraft” on my BlackBerry. In the subject line what comes up is “draft”. Would you then share that draft? Would you share a letter that was marked confidential with other people, or would you immediately try to contact the person who lost it?
I'm suggesting, and I think the question has already been asked, who proactively contacted Ms. Block? Who proactively contacted the chair of the finance committee? Who proactively contacted the clerk of the finance committee? If you did, when? If you didn't, why not?
That's to all of you.
12:35 p.m.
Co-President, Tactix Government Relations and Public Affairs, As an Individual
If I may, I'll start.
I certainly understand the Speaker's ruling and the respect all of us must have for Parliament as an institution. In my 25 years in my professional career here in Ottawa, I have never seen anything like this or borne witness to anything like this.
The critical point is that in my own case, when we got it we did not forward it to anyone. And the other thing, as per the attestation of our IT professional, it was removed from our computer systems at 3:30 on the Friday afternoon.
Certainly when one makes a decision to take certain actions, one simply doesn't have all the information available to make the best decision. And if hindsight is a guide to us, certainly one of those decisions that we might have taken on Thursday or Friday would indeed have been to contact the clerk of the finance committee, or the chair of the finance committee, or Ms. Block.
But I just have to underscore that this was something we simply had never dealt with before. What we did was take a course of action so that we could assure the House and all parliamentarians that we had removed the document in question from our computer systems on the Friday afternoon, and that it was not shared.
