Thank you, Madam Chair.
There are a lot of questions, and I want to address some of them.
The first one, to start with, is the core issue of whether this is a good use of committee time or not. Forgive me if I'm not too willing to put all my eggs into the basket of a representative of the government coming to this committee meeting, reading some emails and saying there's nothing to see here, everything's fine and let's move on and do something else. This is, to me, not a good enough way to study this issue.
The core issue, I think, if I look at it, is that on November 20, there were lawyers in court—if you just think about the timing here, this would be during the day at some point—telling a judge that something happened and a decision had been made, when that very day cabinet was going to consider that idea. Generally speaking, cabinet meetings are in the later part of the day. To me, that raises a whole bunch of questions: Lawyers were told to do something in anticipation of something probably happening later that day, and then we get into all the date questions after that.
To me, there is an ample number of questions here that need to be addressed beyond the simple, “Oops, we made a mistake, and it should have been this day or that day.” Right at the very start of this, before those supposed human errors were made, there was a fundamental question of whether lawyers were instructed by someone in cabinet to say something that actually hadn't happened yet.
To me, there are ample questions here that need to be looked at. We don't need to spend weeks and months on this. It's a very quick thing. I believe there is a very strong case for looking at what was done and how it was done so that we can make sure.
If there is nothing wrong, that's great. If there was something done wrong—and from that perspective it appears very questionable—then I think it's something that we as parliamentarians must look at to make sure that the process is updated or fixed in the system. To me, that's the fundamental question here. I think there are plenty of reasons to proceed with this study.
Now I'll get to some of the questions.
To Mr. Brunelle-Duceppe regarding the Roxham Road study, the way this is written is “November 4”. There are six meetings before then, so there is ample time to do this and do Roxham Road at the same time. As you saw, we're very willing to get rid of the November 4 date, too, if that's what's necessary. Even with that date in there, there is ample meeting time to do this.
As to Ms. Kwan's question of inviting other people, again, we attempted to do that. Even in the wording as it is, at the third meeting we can invite whomever we want. It's certainly not my intention to restrict the kinds of people we would request to come to the meeting. There's ample opportunity to invite others the committee feels are necessary.
To Mr. Serré and delaying this in order to do other things, the whole point of it is to do the investigation. This meeting here today is not to actually perform the investigation. It's simply to decide to do this or not. I think that's the whole point of the meetings, so that's what we'll need to do.
To Mr. Zuberi and the question of the summary of the ATIP, Ms. Kwan actually did a great job of explaining some of what's in the ATIPs. These three ATIPs are specific to this case. There are a lot of documents in there similar to the ones that Ms. Kwan read out. They detail some of the back-and-forth that happened during this time and they're very relevant to this particular case. That's the high-level summary of what's in there. Ms. Kwan also did a great job of giving you some of the more nuanced details of the kinds of materials in there. That's very important and pertinent to the case.
I think that summarizes most of the answers to the questions that I've heard to date. I think the key point here is that this is an important study. It doesn't have to be a long study, but there are some pretty significant questions about what happened on that day regarding the lawyers in the court, what they said to the judge and why they said that even though the decision may not have actually been made at that point.
I'll leave it at that for now.