—but it's not actually what I have to say; it's ordinary Canadians who have been dragged into this, and they have a right to be heard.
Mrs. Perelmuter was in fear for her own personal safety for a while. She didn't want to leave the house. Some of their 27 employees, particularly young women on staff, were also concerned about their safety. Maybe it's laughable to some members here. Maybe it's something that's not important or germane to where they want to go, but this is what Canadians are in shock about. This is why we are here.
Chair, if in some measure I can protect at least a couple of Canadians from this kind of abuse, I will feel that my time has been well spent and that I am doing my job here.
Mr. Perelmuter says he understands that politics is a tough business, but he said that his company is not partisan. Again, the difference between politics, policy and sheer partisanship, just to score political points, drag anybody down with you, it doesn't matter, because we have to score those points.... These people were unfairly caught in the crossfire. His company had only a tangential connection to the WE affair and had nothing to do—nothing—with the student services grant at the heart of the controversy. The information they were looking for was from the times the Prime Minister and his wife, before he was prime minister, would have spoken to maybe a Legion or a charity affair; I don't know. It was ridiculous.
Mr. Perelmuter goes on to say, “It's something that I never thought we would have to deal with. We're not in a controversial type of business.” As part of its investigation into the affair, the ethics committee asked Speakers' Spotlight to turn over documents related to any fees earned by the Prime Minister and his family members for speaking engagements over the past 12 years. At that time, Parliament was prorogued, so the clerk informed Mr. Perelmuter that he no longer had to submit the documents requested by the committee. “Aha,” says the opposition. “There—you see? They wanted to stop those documents from being produced. That was the evil plan.”
At the same time, Conservative MP Michael Barrett sent the company a letter the following week, which he released to the media before Mr. Perelmuter said he'd had the chance to read it, asking him to do the right thing and turn over the documents directly to the members of the then disbanded committee. So you see that Mr. Barrett had a plan to get to the bottom of all of this nefarious wrongdoing.
Mr. Perelmuter said the company's legal counsel informed him that releasing the documents in that manner, without an order from the committee, would violate privacy laws. We work by the rule of law. We have parliamentary tradition and parliamentary rules that we follow. Mr. Perelmuter said that he was upset that a member of Parliament would ask the company to break the law. This is what he told the committee.
Ms. Bergen's Facebook post came shortly after Mr. Barrett publicly released his letter. By making the request public, Mr. Perelmuter said, he “definitely felt like [he was] being intimidated” by Barrett. He said, “It was frankly quite shocking [to me] to be completely honest,” adding, about launching a lawsuit against Conservative MPs, that “certainly it's crossed my mind”.
That is where those Conservative MPs have brought us as parliamentarians.
I don't know about you, Madam Chair, and about other colleagues here, but my reputation, the honour, the privilege, as a parliamentarian is that what we do here is for the good of Canadians. We would never, never bring our position, our role.... I take my role as a parliamentarian on a committee, when we ask for witnesses and require witnesses to appear.... Anybody who has seen the work that we're doing on MindGeek and Pornhub will know that.
We are doing some very important work there, and we want to get to the bottom of those issues because that's what's important to Canadians. But to use those same powers against ordinary, innocent Canadians for partisan purposes, I cannot condone. I'm not one of those parliamentarians who gets up and rants and raves, so I think I may have surprised a few of my good friends here. This is what gets me, innocent people being dragged in.
Mr. Barrett participated in that committee hearing but he did not address the matter. He did ask Mr. Perelmuter several questions about some specific speaking engagements. I am extremely disappointed and shocked, but maybe not surprised. This is me saying that Mr. Barrett was present here and he did not use his time to offer a complete apology for his actions. That's what I said at the time, to give Mr. Barrett some time, the ample opportunity, to do the right thing. He's so keen on doing the right thing.
I and other members on the Liberal side, and Mr. Angus from the NDP, did take that time to apologize to the Perelmuters and the chair of the committee. Mr. Sweet, as chair of our ethics committee, did the right thing by offering a sincere apology on behalf of the committee for any of the unintended consequences that came from any actions of the committee members in regard to the obligation of our office. Then once the committee...remember when the prorogation happened, that must have been the evil plan, but the committee was reconstituted in September after the prorogation was over, after we had the new throne speech and after we had done the reset.
Our committee then sent a narrower request to Speakers' Spotlight for records of the speaking fees earned by Mr. Trudeau and his wife. The company complied with that request and those records were provided to the committee members for a week. I think committee members are familiar with how that's done, in privacy. We had all the time in the world to peruse them and guess what? No one, including Mr. Barrett, asked any questions about those documents at our meeting in December.
So that was the story of dragging in innocent witnesses with absolutely no connection to the matter at hand, except for a family name. Yes, that'll be just enough. They were dragged in front of the committee and their reputations and their personal well-being put up as fodder for the mill.
I'm going to keep saying that the opposition members on the committee presupposed the conclusion in this matter, exactly as the members of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics tried to do. They're doing everything they can to make the narrative fit the facts.
Unfortunately, we won't be satisfied with that response. Canadians have understood the game the Conservatives and their opposition collaborators are playing, and they aren't buying what they're selling. As Canadians, we will never allow a tribunal, whether parliamentary or otherwise, to render a decision before hearing the case put before it. That's the kind of judicial procedure used in dictatorships and oligarchies, not in Canada.
So I find it very interesting that, on the one hand, my opposition colleagues condemn authoritarian dictatorships that don't abide by the basic principles of legal fairness yet, on the other hand, sit on the committee and try to advance a process that has completely abandoned any semblance of legal fairness.
The scope of the motion before us is so broad and the motion itself so unrelated to this study that we, as members, have no choice but to reject it.
Rather than do that, my colleague Mr. Turnbull has introduced an amendment that will give the opposition another chance to take a crack at the settled matter of WE Charity's involvement in the student grant program. They're doing it under the pretext of a study on the prorogation of Parliament without however seeking the cooperation of the Prime Minister and his staff.
Reading the motion, which I hope will soon be amended, I thought it was interesting to see how obvious it was that the opposition had attempted to disguise its secret WE Charity study as a study of the prorogation. By simply looking at the dates of the documents requested, you can see that the opposition members aren't interested in the prorogation but rather are trying to connect WE Charity to this study.
If we support the amendment to the motion, they can still play that game, albeit in a slightly more limited way. I understand the frustration of my opposition colleagues, who have tried for months to raise the matter in several committees and the media, but without success. Now they're trying once again to make a final effort to embarrass the government over WE Charity. Seriously, where are their priorities?
These requests for witnesses and documents are nothing more than another set‑up designed to slow the government's work, bog down officials in paperwork and make them waste time sorting, examining and sending documents to an overworked Translation Bureau rather than work on implementing the government's programs.
I say that ironically, but I find it amusing to hear the opposition leader say he wants the government to succeed in providing vaccines to Canadians and restarting the economy. He should speak to certain members from his party, who take a different view. However, the opposition leader is allowing his members to slow down the machinery of government by introducing frivolous concurrence motions that effectively achieve that end. We need to move on to other matters. The Conservatives have to stop playing their games, and we have to focus once again on what's important for Canadians: economic recovery and emerging from the COVID‑19 crisis.
And on that note, I conclude my speech.