Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to follow up on my question from Friday and hopefully get some clarification on the Liberal government's lack of transparency when it comes to the procurement of essential PPE. To reiterate, the Liberal government has been using national security exceptions in order to prevent Canadians from knowing who is being awarded contracts for items such as disposable, non-medical masks.
When asked on October 1 by the member for Charlesbourg—Haute-Saint-Charles about contracts not being disclosed due to national security reasons, the Minister of Public Services and Procurement said, and I quote, “we made all of our contracts public on our website at the end of July in the interest of full transparency for Canadians.”
Then when my colleague from Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman pushed back on that reply, the minister doubled down saying, “in the interest of full transparency we revealed on our website at the end of July all of our contracts and suppliers.” That is a definitive statement. It leaves no room for interpretation or doubt.
On Friday, when I raised in question period that I have an email from the minister's departmental staff confirming to a business in my riding that contract recipients for non-medical, disposable masks were being withheld based on the national security exception, the parliamentary secretary changed the government's tune.
The parliamentary secretary acknowledged that they had been using the national security exception in order to prevent Canadians from knowing who is getting contracts for made-in-Canada PPE. Apparently, this is happening so regularly that the Liberals need to plan for a big document dump after the fact.
Setting aside that the Minister of Public Services and Procurement appears to have misled the House and risked putting herself in contempt of Parliament, given what we know to be true based on the department's own website and the parliamentary secretary's recent admissions, it sounds like the Liberals are trying to use the same tactics they did when they released the WE scandal documents. They tried to bury the opposition with redacted paperwork.
If I were a betting man, I would guess that this additional information will come out right before a constituency week or maybe late in December before the House adjourns, or maybe even in June when it adjourns again. That is the real issue.
The government can use the national security exception to prevent foreign companies or governments from bidding on these contracts. However, that does not mean they need to use the secrecy components to prevent Canadian taxpayers from knowing how much the federal government is paying for our own domestic PPE and other protective equipment, and who we are buying it from. How can Canadian companies know they are competitive with other Canadian companies if all of this information is withheld?
To say that we cannot know who is awarded a domestic-only contract for non-medical, disposable masks because it would put our supply at risk seems very disingenuous, especially when the posted list of interested suppliers is on the website, with the company names, emails and phone numbers to get in touch with them. What it comes down to is this: My constituents no longer believe that the government is spending their tax dollars wisely.
After the WE scandal and the Frank Baylis debacle, and with the procurement ombudsman looking into the former minister of environment's contracting practices, just to name a few recent examples, the Liberal government has proven time and again that they do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
When will the government release the names of the companies that received contracts for PPE so that Canadian taxpayers can be assured their money is not being funnelled to well-connected Liberal insiders?