Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 13th, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Yes, the Kielburgers are still in. You're right. So is Bill Morneau, who is also a private citizen at this point. They are in the amendment, but I do think that she's still speaking to whether she thinks that's a good idea or not, so it is relevant to what we have at hand. Maybe you'd like her to reveal more of her position on it, but I think that at this point I would say it's still relevant to the matter that we are speaking to. In terms of relevance, I think there's not an issue at this time.

Go ahead, Ms. Shanahan.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

It's unfortunate some members don't want me to discuss the Perelmuters because we put them in such a terrible situation I don't think we can apologize to them enough, although the Liberal Party and NDP members nevertheless did apologize when they appeared before the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics on December 7.

The couple described everything they had personally experienced. It was the first time in a parliamentary committee setting that I've ever felt truly ashamed to be involved in a situation like that. As the English expression goes, it was an incidence of

“dragging people under the bus” and running the bus over them many times. This is what is in Ms. Vecchio's motion and what is happening here again. Yes, I support the amendment by Mr. Turnbull to remove those two witnesses.

The Perelmuters were not the only witnesses. I could go on about other witnesses who were dragged in front of the ethics committee. I'm sure there are other members who have seen things happening in other committees. There were so many going on at the same time, you couldn't follow them all. What was the idea? Drag as many people in front of as many committees to try to find something, that “got you” moment. Who were they trying to get? They were trying to get innocent Canadians. It was disgusting.

For those who didn't understand what I was saying in French before, that's what I am saying now.

Mrs. Perelmuter was not leaving her house. It was not for isolation's sake. She was afraid to leave her house. The degree of harassment and intimidation that they were subjected to since last August 2020.... That's when Conservative MPs began publicly calling on the company to disclose speaking fees earned over the past 12 years by the Prime Minister, his wife, his mother and his brother, even though it would have contravened privacy laws.

I will continue in English, because I want the members here to understand this.

That is what was going on in social media.

According to the Toronto Star, “In one Facebook post, which is still online, deputy Conservative leader Candice Bergen provided the company’s toll-free phone number and urged people to call to press the point.”

What were they looking for? It was records for the last 12 years. If that's not a witch hunt and a fishing expedition, I don't know what is.

Ever since, Mr. Perelmuter said, with that online harassment.... This is what he told us at his appearance on December 7, which happened after prorogation. Nothing was stopped because of prorogation. It continued.

His company faced harassment, personal threats and a social media campaign that he described as “designed to discredit him and his wife” and damage their reputation. It was real harm against them—both against their reputation and indeed, as I have said, Madam Chair, even to their persons. They were already struggling due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said, “As a leader of a small company I feel that my first obligation is to ensure the physical, emotional and mental health, safety and well-being of our employees. For the first time in my 25-year career I was in a situation where I didn’t feel that I could properly protect everyone from what was going on."

Imagine what he was going through. He said, “We had to get the police involved. It was a really nasty situation.”

What Canadian doing business and trying to survive the pandemic asks for that?

Mr. Perelmuter said that one individual who responded to the Conservative call posted his wife’s photo and private cellphone number on Facebook, along with a rant calling her “disgusting and derogatory things. Her phone started ringing day and night”—

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Madam Chair, I have a point of order.

I fully respect this, but when she's talking about these photos, we've seen the exact same thing done to Charlie Angus. We have seen some of this. Yes, it's absolutely inappropriate, but I'm really hoping we can talk about—

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

We're talking about Mr. Turnbull's amendment, are we not?

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Wonderful.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Ms. Vecchio, I think this is a point of debate, perhaps, more than it is a point of order.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Madam Chair, since Ms. Shanahan is referring to witnesses whose participation would be cancelled by Ms. Vecchio's motion, perhaps people are ready to vote on Mr. Turnbull's amendment. Then we could move on to another motion.

I raise the point in the event members of the committee are ready to vote. We're discussing a point that would not be included in Mr. Turnbull's amendment or Ms. Vecchio's motion in any case.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

It's absolutely the committee's prerogative if they'd like to continue to vote. At this point, though, Ms. Shanahan has the floor, so I'll give the floor back to her. When she doesn't have the floor, we can, if the committee likes, proceed to a vote. It's up to the committee.

We do have other speakers on the list. I will let you know that we have, after this, Ms. Petitpas Taylor, Mr. Turnbull and then Mr. Samson.

Ms. Shanahan.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Thank you, Chair.

I can understand that there are members of the opposition who don't want to hear what I have to say—

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

It's been going on for three months. Of course we want to hear it.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

—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.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Thank you, Ms. Shanahan.

Ms. Petitpas Taylor, you're next.

[Ginette Petitpas Taylor, Liberal, Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, NB]

Thank you so much, Madam Chair. I'm going to cede the floor. I believe that my friend and colleague Ryan Turnbull will be taking my place.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Mr. Turnbull is next on the list.

Mr. Turnbull.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

It's a hard act to follow, in terms of following after my colleague Mrs. Shanahan, whom I have great respect for. I attended a couple of those meetings of the ethics committee, just a very small number. I know she has done great work on that committee and I thank her for speaking so passionately. I, too, share many of her concerns when it comes to bringing forth private [Technical difficulty—Editor].

In just a moment I will speak to my amendment, which does relate to that, but before I get started, I just want to say that I'm sorry I was away from the committee over the last two weeks. I want everyone to know that I wasn't avoiding this important and riveting debate. I was under the weather, but I'm feeling much better now and feel increasingly better every day. I extend my heartfelt thanks to my colleagues and my teammates who filled in for me while I was gone and checked in with me regularly. I really appreciate the fact that we have such a compassionate team.

While I was resting and trying to get better, I probably held on to some vain hope, a small grain of hope and optimism for returning and finding us having made progress on this motion and the proposed amendment, but alas, here we are, still debating this. It's unfortunate.

I have quite a few remarks. I've had lots of time to reflect and had lots of thoughts prepared before I fell ill and was away for a little while, and I'd like to get them on the record.

First of all, the amendment that I put forward was an attempt to compromise. You have to give something to get something. However, the members of the opposition on this committee have to give too, and so far, I don't think there has been a willingness to be flexible and to give a little on the original motion.

I really don't think we need to hear from the Kielburgers and the Honourable Bill Morneau. Let's be honest. I think Mrs. Shanahan's comments are really poignant and point to the harm that can be caused, inadvertently, of course. It's not necessarily intentional, but it is harm that members of the public—private citizens, business owners, and so on—can experience as a result of being called before these committees. I think that's an important consideration.

Now, I left those two invitations, those renewed invitations, in the proposed amendment as a way to say to the opposition parties, “Okay, here is something perhaps that would appeal to your interests,” which I think clearly we all know are for partisan purposes, or at least I suspect that, based on all the comments I've heard.

What I really think is that the added testimony from the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Diversity, Inclusion and Youth would actually be relevant to extending the study, and hearing from them would add to the testimony something perhaps that we haven't heard before.

These witnesses are important because we can get a sense of the depth and breadth of the economic impact, as well as the significant data and evidence, not to mention the first-hand experiences relayed to us from our constituents about the inequities and vulnerabilities that Canadians are living with or are experiencing due to COVID-19, which is a reason that the Minister of Diversity, Inclusion and Youth would be appropriate, in my view, because this is her expertise. This is her mandate and file.

We also know that economic impacts have not been distributed evenly across our economy. Quite the opposite, they've been distributed unevenly. It goes without saying, and I think we've all heard this over and over again, that some industries have been decimated while others have prospered. Some will bounce back quickly and others will take years to return to pre-pandemic levels.

I remember in one of the previous meetings, before I was away, Mr. Blaikie made a comment. I think he said that the pandemic “also matters”. I don't mean to quote him out of context, because it was within what he was saying and I'm sure he didn't mean this, but it seemed to me that it was sort of implied in his remarks that the pandemic was the distraction from what the opposition was really looking for in this study. Only a party focused on playing political games would characterize a global pandemic as an afterthought or a distraction.

The pandemic clearly is what we all, and certainly this committee, need to be completely seized with and focused upon at every moment. We are in a third wave of a global health crisis of epic proportions. Canadians need us. They care that their government is working for them, at all levels, to essentially meet their needs and protect them from the worst parts of this crisis—or help them get through this.

Canadians are rightfully exhausted by this and are counting on us to help. We can't afford to be looking backwards and to be distracted with partisan games, which is really what the original motion is about.

I think extending it, with a couple of witnesses, is a more than reasonable solution. It's an attempt at compromise. However, I see that this doesn't satisfy the opposition.

I want to quote someone. There's a gentleman I heard recently, who I'm sure some of my other colleagues probably know and admire. In a recent interview, Dr. Michael Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization's health emergencies program, said:

I think what we've learnt in Ebola outbreaks is you need to react quickly, you need to go after the virus, you need to stop the chains of transmission, you need to engage with communities very deeply; community acceptance is hugely important.

You need to be co-ordinated, you need to be coherent, you need to look at the other sectoral impacts, the schools and security and economic.

So it's essentially many of those same lessons but the lessons I've learnt after so many Ebola outbreaks in my career are be fast, have no regrets; you must be the first mover. The virus will always get you if you don't move quickly and you need to be prepared and I say this.

One of the great things in emergency response—and anyone who's involved in emergency response will know this—if you need to be right before you move you will never win.

“Perfection is the enemy of the good,” which is something our Prime Minister says often, “when it comes to emergency management.”

“Speed trumps perfection and the problem in society we have at the moment”—and he's speaking to this global pandemic—“is everyone is afraid of making a mistake, everyone is afraid of the consequence of error.”

“But the greatest error is not to move, the greatest error is to be paralysed by the fear of failure and I think that's the single biggest [lesson] I've learnt in Ebola responses in the past.”

That's what Dr. Michael Ryan said in a recent interview. I thought, wow, this is powerful advice. It really speaks to the need for us to move quickly, to focus on the future and not the past, and to not be debating, for months, a motion that has absolutely no relevance to managing the crisis we're in.

It is nothing but a political game, and the opposition parties, for some reason, persist. I understand that they want to win political points and get an uptick in the polls. I understand that. I understand that there's partisanship here, and it's always present. However, can we not put that aside and focus on what really matters?

We're heading into a wall, and we're looking in the rearview mirror instead of being focused on preparing for the fourth wave. I hope we don't have a fourth wave, but my colleague Dr. Duncan and people who have studied virology and understand pandemics....

There is so much work for us to be doing. I'm lying in bed for two weeks trying to get better, and all I can think about is how I can possibly rest when there is so much damned work to do that matters to people out there in the world—work that they're counting on me and us to do for them.

Here we are—what is it?—one month later, still debating. I don't know how many weeks it's been, but it seems like forever to me, because there are so many more pressing things coming into my constituency office, and so many other things, even within this committee, that we could be focusing on. It's just disheartening, to say the least. I say it's really disheartening.

Some of my colleagues on this committee have made it seem as though this is just a matter of how much time we use for this study, but I think it's about more than that. It's about what we invest our time in, what we choose to spend our time on. We're making decisions about what to focus on. We know that standing committees are masters of their own domain. We could be pursuing other more important topics, and there's a long list.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

I have a point of order, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Yes, Mr. Kent. Are you going to say “Let's vote”?

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

No, not at all. I respect Mr. Turnbull's passionate words, but with regard to his urging that the committee vote to invite Minister Freeland and Minister Chagger to appear before committee, has he spoken to them about the committee's open invitation, to which they have still not responded?

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

I guess that's an interjection of some sort, but I'll give the floor back to Mr. Turnbull.

I can tell you that from my position—

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Madam Chair, it was just to Mr. Turnbull's point about the value of time. I would think that if they responded to an existing committee invitation, that time would be addressed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

I guess I can put on the record that I have no responses at this point to any of the previous invitations.

Mr. Turnbull, you have the floor.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

Thank you.

That's a great question. I have not heard anything from them to date. This is the whole point of the amendment that I put forward: to focus our time on something reasonable that adds a little more testimony, if that's the wish of the committee, but that doesn't extend too far into the witch hunt that I think the opposition parties are looking for, the “fishing expedition”, as my colleague Ms. Shanahan called it, which is how I would characterize it, too.

Thank you for the question, Mr. Kent. I definitely appreciate it.

I just want to continue with my remarks here.

The list is long. The committee did a study—I think some exceptional work was done—on preparing for the possibility of a pandemic election. Now, we know that's only going to happen if opposition parties thrust it upon the government, because there's no way we want an election during a global pandemic.

Bill C-19, however, has been tabled in the House. I understand it's still being debated, but I think we could be doing a prestudy of that bill, which would help expedite its passage through second reading. I think that would be a much better use of our time.

Another priority, which my honourable colleague Dr. Duncan has raised, is evaluating the effectiveness of infection, prevention and control measures on Parliament Hill and a bunch of other factors related to looking at how we responded during the pandemic. That's useful for helping us prepare for future waves or future pandemics, and I think it's a really important one.

I understand that my colleague Ms. Petitpas Taylor also put a motion on notice which I think has lots of relevance. I too have put a motion on notice which focuses on another topic that I think would be much more relevant for us to focus on. It's the one that focuses on the Ontario Superior Court decision to strike down changes to the Canada Elections Act that help protect Canadians against misinformation during elections.

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

On a point of order, let's get back to the motion.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Ruby Sahota]

Mr. Turnbull.

[Ryan Turnbull, Liberal, Whitby, ON]

I have great concerns, within the election process, about the amount of misinformation that I've witnessed. In my riding Conservative Party of Canada fund flyers went to every primary residence in my riding, which provided misinformation to the public—it was actually stamped by the Conservative Party—in the last election.