Mr. Speaker, I know we all engage in a great deal of partisan banter and that it is impossible to keep politics out of the House of Commons but I want to make a couple of comments about why I think this matter is of significance and why it is a matter of privilege for members of the House and the committee.
Under any norm of natural justice, in any proceeding, when a witness refers to a document, the people who are questioning the witness need to be able to see the document in order to know whether the witness is quoting from the whole document, whether the witness is quoting from the document fairly or whether the witness is omitting some things that should be referred to as well. This is an absolute precondition of anything that would amount to a fair process as it relates to getting to the heart of an issue.
The Afghanistan committee was established by the House. The question of the treatment of detainees was one of the issues that was contained in the parliamentary resolution which was referred to and passed by the House. We have had the prospect in the last week of witnesses appearing in front of the committee who not only had full access to information to which we did not have access but had access to documents in a completely non-redacted form, to all of the information in terms of memoranda and whatever briefing notes were provided to them or by them to others. Frankly, we do not know exactly what documents they thought they had and we were not able to have access to those.
The second thing that happened, which my colleague from Ottawa Centre has referred to, is that there was a first witness, Mr. Colvin, whose name is well-known to members of the House, who offered to share information with members of the committee and was then told that he could not share it.
We now have the situation where the legal advisor to the committee has advised the committee that we can hear evidence that the government might consider to be confidential or affecting national security and that sections 37 and 38 of the Evidence Act are not a barrier to members of the committee hearing this information. The Department of Justice has said that it does not accept that interpretation and refuses to allow it to go forward to the committee.
The hard part is that the government says that it wants to get to the truth and that it does not want to put barriers in the way of members doing their job, but that is exactly what it is doing. In preventing members from having access to exactly the same information as the people who are giving testimony have access to, it is impossible for us to do our job in an adequate way.
If somebody says that this is just about politics and not really about anything of substance or that it is just one side saying something and the other side saying something else, just a matter of political argument, I do not think that is true.
Mr. Speaker, if you find that the way in which the government has allowed witnesses to appear in terms of receiving briefings from departmental officials before their appearance, being given access to documents which others did not have and then denying to members of Parliament access to those same documents in the same form in which they are being considered by witnesses, I really believe that is a direct obstacle to our ability to do our job.
Mr. Speaker, if you are looking for a precedent with respect to how else this could have been done, I am reliably informed that in 2004 the public accounts committee requested and received all cabinet documents directly related to the sponsorship program, including cabinet committee minutes of meetings and briefing notes of PCO and PMO to the prime minister. These documents were provided in an unredacted form to the public accounts committee in a timely fashion; that is, before the ministers, former minister and senior public servants were called to appear.
Mr. Speaker, In the unfortunate event that you decide there is no case of privilege here or that you cannot see one, I would put it to you that we on this side of the House are left in literally an impossible position. We have absolutely no choice in that circumstance other than to insist on a public inquiry because a public inquiry under the Inquiries Act and a judge, or anyone sitting as a hearing officer under the Inquiries Act, would absolutely be required to follow these principles.
Therefore, the real question for the House and for you, Mr. Speaker, is whether the committees of the House, in carrying out their work and investigation, are obliged to follow the simple rules of natural justice, yes or no. If you find that the answer is no, that they do not, then we are left with a very harsh conclusion, and that is that we in the House cannot or have not created a system of committees that actually allows them to function in a proper and appropriate way.
I think that is something of some significance when it comes to getting to the bottom of this question.
My question is quite simple: are the committees of the House obliged to follow the rules of natural justice?
I think the answer is clearly yes. We do not have a choice. We cannot leave members of Parliament in a position where they do not have access to the same information as the witnesses at the committee. That puts them in an impossible position and we cannot accept that.