Thanks, Chair.
We've all had the opportunity to read the report from Mr. Johnston, and it's certainly not a complete review of what we've seen to date. There are notable omissions from it, including, of course, that the foundation that Mr. Johnston was a part of, the Trudeau Foundation, was the target of a foreign influence operation that saw $140,000 from Beijing-backed donors go to the foundation and then those cutouts, acting on behalf of Beijing, then get access to the Prime Minister. That orchestrated campaign of influence involved another individual from the Trudeau Foundation that the Prime Minister tapped to investigate foreign interference, Morris Rosenberg.
While Mr. Johnston did comment on some of the public reporting about reports from our spy agencies, he must have missed those. Maybe his subscription wasn't up to date with The Globe and Mail when those reports were published.
I heard lots of comments about people's fitness to hold the office of Prime Minister, but we currently have a Prime Minister who, in the face of a majority vote of the House of Commons to hold a public inquiry, instead picked his neighbour, ski buddy and member of the Trudeau Foundation board, which is mired in the foreign interference controversy, to issue a report.
I will say one thing that should be a cautionary tale to anyone who would take the bait on these briefings, and that's that the folks in our bureaucracy who are preparing these reports are delivering them to people in the public safety minister's office or the Prime Minister's Office. They drop binders on the table in front of those who are receiving these reports without context and without technical support, and the matter is considered closed. That's one of the items listed in Mr. Johnston's report. I imagine that this issue of transparency and context has not been remedied since Mr. Johnston issued his report on Tuesday.
We have ministers who were told.... Some of them received information. It was a failure of the bureaucracy to provide them with information. We saw an awful lot of that. We saw in this report from Mr. Johnston that it was the public service's fault. Where there was fault, it was the fault of the public service and not the fault of government. Well, the government has had their hands on the controls of the machinery of government for eight years and are presiding over its brokenness, as it's been described by Mr. Johnston.
We don't know what the ministers aren't able to tell us and what the Prime Minister isn't able to or won't tell us on this. That's why we need to have a public inquiry. That's why the majority of members elected to the House of Commons called for a public inquiry. We already have an issue where we were just told we were going to have a couple of people who the Prime Minister picks take a look at something, and then we're to believe that everything is okay.
His challenge so far is that the people he picks are all connected to the Trudeau Foundation. They're all Liberal insiders. It was the Trudeau Foundation to investigate foreign interference with Mr. Rosenberg, the Trudeau Foundation to act as a special rapporteur with Mr. Johnston, and the Trudeau Foundation to provide Mr. Johnston with advice of whether he's in a conflict of interest. You'd be shocked to learn that his colleague from the Trudeau Foundation said that he wasn't, and a lifetime Liberal donor hired as one of Mr. Johnston's staff advised him in this process.
We need a public inquiry. We don't need a situation where it's just the opposition leaders.... Our party has members appointed to the committee of parliamentarians that the Prime Minister has set up. It's not a committee of Parliament. They're going to take a look at the documents and not be able to talk about them. We don't believe that any of the opposition leaders should tie both or one of their hands behind their back in this process.