Mr. Speaker, as I was saying, the concern the government has with the content of the testimony of those individuals who were ordered to appear is so great that ministers of the Crown ordered individuals not to appear at committee, in contravention of an order of this House. We have seen the lengths to which the government is prepared to go to avoid talking about issues that are embarrassing to it and that are damaging to it.
We now have Bill C-11. We have legislation where, for many months, the opposition has been calling on the government to take a major step to protect Canadians' privacy, and it could achieve that by banning Huawei. We heard very troubling reports today about a country where we learned that via Huawei, communist China was able to listen in to a NATO partners' phone calls happening in that country and listen to the phone calls of a prime minister. This certainly is vindication for everyone who has called for Huawei to be banned. That is a concrete step that the government could take, with the support of this House, to protect the privacy of Canadians, but that has not happened.
We are six years into the mandate of the Liberals. They got a new mandate two years ago. Now they have this legislation. The industry minister has put it forward, but they do not want it to go to the industry committee. They want it to come to the ethics committee.
Why did they wait until this spring before they wanted it to arrive at the committee? Interestingly, last summer, the Ethics Commissioner said that he was investigating the Prime Minister for the Canada student service grant debacle, after the Prime Minister had said he failed to recuse himself from discussions related to the awarding of that contract. Members of the Prime Minister's family had received half a million dollars from the WE organization, and then the Prime Minister voted to give that same organization a half-billion-dollar grant, which would have included more than $40 million in benefit or revenue for the WE organization.
After the Ethics Commissioner said that he was going to conduct that investigation, the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner's office put out a tweet. The tweet highlighted the timeline that it usually takes for a report to come back on a potential violation of the Conflict of Interest Act. The first two reports issued by the Ethics Commissioner with respect to the Prime Minister were “The Trudeau Report” and “Trudeau II Report”. There will be a third report bearing the same name, which is due this spring. So—