Thank you, Mr. Chair.
So much about this situation, frankly, is just mind-boggling to me. One of the chief accountability committees in Parliament is asking for vaccine contracts related to the COVID-19 vaccine. We are not asking for it for public release. We are asking for it so that a small group of members of Parliament, who have been charged with holding the government accountable in these areas, can privately review these documents and provide recommendations to the government. That is all we're asking for.
The information that many public servants have should be available to this committee. Their function is the implementation of the government's directives, but our function as a committee is accountability. It is to review and provide those recommendations.
The government and pharmaceutical companies who are here today are happy to have the implementers—the public servants who don't have that same accountability challenge function—to have the documents, which is more people in sum, but you are not willing to let us have access to the documents.
It is important to just underline that, in our system, we have the supremacy of Parliament, which means that Parliament is the supreme law-making body. It doesn't seem to be understood by the witnesses very well that we have an unfettered, constitutionally protected right to request documents. This has been recognized for over 100 years by multiple Speakers, as recently as by Speaker Rota.
It's not a question of our engaging in some kind of negotiation, like we're going to ask really politely, we're going to let you eat some of the cookies at the back and then maybe you'll give us a little more information in the documents—