Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Mr. Walsh, once again, for helping to bring clarity to our deliberations.
I appreciated your opening remarks, that one of the first prerequisites we have to lay down is what standard of truthfulness we expect. I hope that we would expect the highest standard of truthfulness from any witness, but especially a minister of the crown. I also thank you for your comment about guilt by omission or an offence by omission as much as commission. I think as we wrestle with this, that's what it seems to be coming to.
Also, this idea that you have to ask the exact, right question or you're not going to get any answer...I call it the Rumpelstiltskin effect. Others might even call it the Mulroney effect, because others have used this excuse to be less than truthful, frankly.
Could there be any doubt, when Mr. McKay asked the question at a foreign affairs committee meeting, about what he really wanted to know? He asked, “Who put the 'not' on the document?”, and she said, “I have no idea, I don't know.”
She actually directed her chief of staff to overturn the recommendation of the CIDA officials for the funding of Kairos. It would be reasonable for her to assume that the person she directed to overturn it changed the document to reflect her orders.
I think that's guilt by omission. I think she should have volunteered. She could have said, “I don't know who inserted the word “not”, but I told my chief of staff to reverse that recommendation by CIDA.” That would have been fully truthful. Do you agree?