I've mentioned this a few times. I want to speak to the threshold for questions of privilege and related questions of reporting to the House.
Chair, you mentioned the instance of Mr. Firth as a precedent, which seems incredibly offside to me. I want to go through that instance, if that is to be the precedent that we're setting here and holding ourselves to, because it's wildly different, and people should know.
You'll know that OGGO, the government operations committee, did report to the House in relation to Mr. Firth. This is the level of evasion that we saw from that witness.
On Monday, October 17, the committee agreed to undertake a study of the ArriveCAN application. In the course of this study, the committee chose to invite Kristian Firth and Darren Anthony to appear before it. The committee reported the following to the House:
On November 2, 2023, and February 9, 2024, subpoenas from the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates were issued to the owners of GC Strategies, Kristian Firth and Darren Anthony. The latter refused to testify before the committee.
(ii) The Auditor General revealed that GC Strategies might have received nearly 20 million dollars in government contracts for the ArriveCAN application.
I'll skip ahead a little bit:
According to Bosc and Gagnon, “If a witness declines an invitation, the committee may issue him a subpoena by adopting a motion to this effect. If the witness still refuses to appear, the committee may refer the matter to the House, which may then order the witness to appear. If the witness disobeys the order, he or she could be found in contempt.”
In order to see the witnesses in committee to testify, the committee recommended the following:
...an order of the House do issue requiring Kristian Firth and Darren Anthony each to appear before the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates...with such accessibility accommodations the witnesses may request and the chair agrees to arrange.
If the chair of the committee informs the Speaker and Sergeant-at-Arms in writing that one or both have failed to appear as ordered after those 21 days:
(a) the Sergeant-at-Arms shall take Kristian Firth, Darren Anthony or both of them, as the case may be, into his custody for the purposes of enforcing their attendance before the committee at dates and times determined by the chair of the committee, for which the Speaker shall issue his warrant accordingly;
(b) the Sergeant-at-Arms shall discharge from his custody a witness taken into his custody, pursuant to paragraph (a)....
The point of going through this is that we have a situation here that is more akin to Mr. Ouimet's than Mr. Firth's: We have a situation of a witness who attended but didn't answer questions to the satisfaction of Mr. Perkins or of my colleagues from the Bloc and the NDP.
I don't know if Garnett wants to check his dictionary once or twice again, but if the synonym is “fabricate” and “to lie”, then yes, the language of “prevaricate” is a problem, because this isn't just clever. There are any number of instances in which I see politicians being asked questions and then pivoting. They move to acknowledging the question. They move to answering it in a different way, in an unsatisfactory way for many of us who might be asking the question.
That is very different from a refusal to attend. Mr. Bains attended of his own volition. We asked; he attended. My understanding from the chair is that he was willing to attend again. Instead, our response, heavy-handed as it is, is to suggest that he has breached a member's privilege.
I'll get back on the list to run down a number of examples of breaches of privilege, not only in Canada but in the U.K., and the severity of this is significant. We should not be watering this down. This isn't “I didn't like the answers, and I'm going to throw a tantrum about it and then point to privilege.” That's not what privilege is about.
Honestly, I don't love speaking until 9:30 or 9:50 at night on this and I don't love when witnesses don't give us the answers that we want. We should go after them as we deem fit. I've been known to do that too. I find that in committee is the one time I get to act like a lawyer again and cross-examine, but that's wildly different—wildly different—from suggesting that one's privilege has been breached and elevating it to that standard, akin to Mr. Firth refusing, absolutely refusing, to testify in the face of a proper summons, let alone an invitation. We didn't have to summons Mr. Bains. He attended on an invitation.
I'm going to get back on the list, Chair, and I'm going to run down a lengthy list of examples of privilege being properly breached so that members can understand the significant threshold that this reaches, and we are nowhere near that threshold.
Please put me back on the list.