Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm not going to support the amendment either. I appreciate the member's bringing it forward, but I think it doesn't add to the original motion.
Now, I fully acknowledge that the original motion is not perfectly worded—very few motions are—but I think we should stick with the original motion and proceed on that basis.
Look, here's why I think this committee should be seized with this issue and proceed with a study over a few meetings on this issue. Parliament has essentially been suspended since March 13. When it has met, it has met for a few brief minutes before going into a special committee or committee of the whole. In those special committees, the House of Commons is not sitting; it's the special committee or the committee of the whole that's sitting, which has virtually no power. It simply has the power for members to ask questions, for members to give statements and for members to present petitions. The usual powers of Parliament—to present motions, to introduce bills, to hold the government accountable—simply aren't there.
This committee, though, has an opportunity for us to hold the government accountable on this important issue.
It's only a small slice, a $1-billion slice of a $231-billion stimulus package. However, the fact is that the government has been operating under extraordinary emergency powers, granted to it on March 13 of this year, and we have a job to do, as parliamentarians on this committee, to make sure that a portion of that money is being spent in the proper manner. In this case, we have a responsibility to look at exactly what happened to ensure that the other monies that are actually going out the door are being properly spent.
The money hasn't actually been fully returned. There was $30 million transferred to the WE organization. As of the last news that I read, $22 million has been sent back and some $8 million is still waiting to be sent back.
The heart of the matter is this: The government has maintained from day one that the WE organization was the only organization in the entire country, including the federal public service—some 250,000 strong—that could deliver this program. Increasingly it looks like that's a falsehood. Increasingly it looks like that's not the case. They clearly couldn't deliver it to official French-language communities in Quebec and official French-language minority communities outside of the province of Quebec. That's why they had to enter into a contract and hire a lobbying group to do that.
It calls into question why this contract was let in the first place. It was signed on June 23 and backdated to May 5, even before the federal cabinet had considered it. We need to know why that was the case. It doesn't look like the government's story is holding up. It doesn't look like it had nothing to do with this: that this was all to do with the federal bureaucracy, which recommended this; that it wasn't involved in the early stages of helping to draft the proposal; and that it wasn't at all involved with creating this program and structuring it in a way so that WE Charity would get this program. It doesn't hold up that WE Charity was the only organization able to deliver this.
It calls into question why this whole thing came to be. Increasingly, to me, it looks like the Liberal government and particularly Liberal ministers were out to help their friends and supporters out there, using the cover of a pandemic and the extraordinary emergency powers they have to do this.
We cannot, as a committee, let the government get away with this. We have a responsibility, not just to the people who pay tax in this country but to the broader public, to ensure that there's good governance in this country and that we get to the bottom of this and hold the government accountable.
That's why I think we should have a few meetings on this, why we shouldn't accept this amendment and water down this motion, and get to the bottom of this. We want to ensure we understand exactly why this contract was given to the WE organization, exactly why that was done, despite the fact that they couldn't deliver it to 25% of this country, to some nine million Canadians whose first official language is French.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.