Thank you very much, Chair.
I must echo the words of my colleague. We've had six, seven, eight, nine meetings on this issue, and we have consistently heard from the Auditor General's team, as well as the officials from numerous departments, that in the exercise of procurement, it is not only advisable not to have political interference; indeed, it is part of the standards of professional practice and in keeping with this separation of the machinery of government, which must continue regardless of who the government in power is, and the political side, which, rightly so, is presenting the kind of vision and policy and way forward and new legislation and so on that needs to be put forward to ensure that Canadians have a better quality of life and can enjoy the standards that Canada enjoys on so many levels.
At a time of one of the greatest crises we've had in the last hundred years, a global pandemic, this professional public service was able to procure the kind of protective equipment and the kind of administrative and management processes that were needed to protect Canadians until vaccines were developed, which, again, were obtained by this professional team. I will wager that none of us here around the table would have been able to do the same work.
Chair, would you agree with me? Would you have liked to be in that seat, trying to get PPE, trying to get people to develop an application and trying to develop vaccines?
No. We are politicians. We have a role. We represent our constituencies, but we are not here to run the machinery of government. That, rightly, is separate from the political arm, but to hear my Conservative colleagues speak, the political arm should be dipping its fingers into every pie, and I think we know what that would mean. We've all travelled enough and have seen other regimes in other countries to know what that means. That means favouritism, corruption and, certainly, at its most benign, an inefficient and ineffectual government.
It is really only in this issue, which we are all gripped with...the fact that there was inappropriate contracting and there were bad actors taking advantage. That is what is horrific in this case: To think that for all of the public servants who were working above and beyond the call of duty during a very difficult time, there were some bad actors who were taking advantage of that crisis to line their own pockets.
We are gripped with that, and that is the reason I and I think everyone here around the table has confidence that the investigations that are being conducted right now—not just internally and not just by the Auditor General, but also by the RCMP—will get to the truth of the matter, and that those who are responsible will be held to account. That is how we can ensure that our public service can continue to operate with integrity. It's not by picking and choosing who we want to blame and who we want to throw in jail or whatever it is, and the showboating that some politicians want to do.
When we come back to this motion, my preference would definitely be to invite back ministry officials, deputy ministers and so on, which is why, again, Chair, we had to pass a motion here earlier in the week. I'm glad for the support we had from the NDP to invite deputy ministers to these hearings, because we were not consulted at all about the number of meetings. We had an original motion that talked about two meetings, but we were not consulted about holding further meetings, about who those witnesses would be and how they were chosen, or about the length of time and when those meetings would occur.
It really has been extremely frustrating for the members here who really want to get to the bottom of what transpired and be able to produce a report out of this study that will actually be useful in enabling officials going forward—and parliamentarians, for that matter—to continue to have confidence that the oversight function will be overhauled and upheld. We heard testimony to that effect, but as we have done in the past, we will ask for a follow-up.
We have asked for action plans. I and the NDP member at the time, in the 42nd Parliament, asked for action plans to be submitted to public accounts, so that we had assurances that our recommendations were indeed being followed up on—ours and the Auditor General's. I'm not sure....
You know, I appreciate that our regular member from the NDP, Mr. Desjarlais, could not be with us during this time. I want to extend my sympathies to him and his family. I understand he's going through a difficult time right now.
We've had different members from the NDP here, and I'm not sure they realized yesterday, in passing the other last-minute motion by Mr. Genuis yesterday, that they were actually putting a target on the back of any and all public servants who may or may not be legitimately carrying out other contracts for the federal government.
I'm not an expert in this field, but whenever we try to make a “one rule fits all”, there are always a number of very viable and understandable exceptions to that. However, you know, Mr. Genuis was going for that hit and trying to actually, in having that reported to the House, use up time in the House of Commons with these. I believe over 6,000 hours and over 200 reports are on notice right now that can be debated on a concurrent modus.
Basically, Chair, when a report has been produced out of a committee, everybody has agreed and the report has been tabled, why all of a sudden do we want to have three hours of extended debate, essentially a filibuster, on the report, in the House of Commons? It's to waste time in the House of Commons. We know that we have important legislation. In fact, there's the pharmacare legislation. I'm so pleased that we were able to work with the NDP to put forward this pharmacare legislation. As a member in Quebec, I'm well aware of how important and life-changing having access to prescription drugs is. Now we'll be able to extend that across the country—but will we? We have 6,000 hours projected of “waste the House of Commons' time” concurrence motions on notice by the Conservative government.
I would ask for all members here to consider this: If we really want to have the minister here, why don't we just invite her? We have had ministers here before. We can just invite her. That's all right. That's something that this committee has done. We've always been respectful of the fact that ministers have many time constraints. I think it behooves us to have a motion from this committee that shows that respect.
Again, if we were discussing this as we usually do in committee—it could be in camera, it could be in public, but it would be together as a committee, during committee business—we could have come to a reasonable invitation to the minister, but no, here we are. We're over time. People have other things to do, but Mr. Genuis decided this was the ideal time to pull this stunt.
I move to amend the motion by deleting the words “and that this meeting occur within three weeks of this motion being adopted”.
