Mr. Speaker, before I start, I want to advise you that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola.
I want to begin my comments by saying thank you for the ruling today. I know that the opposition requested you to deliberate over what had happened with respect to the redacted documents, and you came back with a very fair ruling that respects the democratic principles of this institution. You ruled that Parliament does in fact reign supreme and that the committees do have significant powers. It was a very respectful ruling and one that leads us to this evening and this debate.
I will remind you of what you said this afternoon as you ruled that the government breached parliamentary privileges by failing to provide the parliamentary body with secret documents that would explain the firing of two scientists at Canada's top infectious disease lab in Winnipeg.
You went further, Mr. Speaker, as you know, to say that it is up to the opposition House leader who asked for the ruling to decide on a follow-up motion that might censure the government or refer the matter for more study. That is precisely where we are this evening.
The motion that was put forward by the opposition House leader speaks to the fact that the House finds the Public Health Agency of Canada to be in contempt for its failure to obey the order of the House adopted on June 2, 2021, as well as the orders of the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations adopted on March 31 and May 10.
That is a very important issue here, because there have been three orders, two by committee and one by this body, for those documents to be provided to the parliamentary law clerk and to House administration officials. The order is for the president to:
attend the Bar of the House, at the expiry of the time provided for Oral Questions on the second sitting day following the adoption of this Order, for the purposes of (a) receiving, on behalf of the Agency, an admonishment delivered by the Speaker; and (b) delivering up the documents ordered by this House on June 2, 2021 to be produced, so that they may be deposited with the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel under the terms of that Order.
For any Canadian who is watching this debate tonight, and I have sat here for most of it, it is rather disturbing to see the government trying to not provide the information that has been ordered by Parliament or by these committees. This is a systemic problem that has been going on for as long as I and many members on the opposition side have been in this Parliament. We see a government that really, despite the words of openness and transparency that the Liberals ran on in 2015, is anything but open and transparent.
What the government would prefer more than anything, especially given the time that we are in right now, would be to have an audience rather than an opposition. All parties in opposition in this House have effectively done what they are mandated to do, and that is to hold the government to account.
When the facts of this case came out, they were disturbing. I will remind the House again, for the sake of Canadians who are watching, how we got to this point. This is critically important.
There were two scientists who were dismissed in January from the Winnipeg lab after their security clearances were revoked in July 2019, and the RCMP was called in to investigate. Xiangguo Qiu, the former head of a key program at the lab, and her biologist husband, Keding Cheng, had been the focus of parliamentary debate for weeks as opposition members became aware and had sought information about this situation.
In May, Canada's spy agency had urged the removal of security clearances for the two scientists and an unknown number of Dr. Qiu's students from China relating to the Wuhan facility and other national security matters.
For months before the couple were expelled from the lab in 2019, access to information documents show that Dr. Qiu played a key role in shipping two exceptionally virulent viruses, Ebola and Henipah, to China's Wuhan Institute. When this became public, the first response from the government was that it was an issue of privacy. It even sprinkled a little racism in there as the opposition, as a result of these published reports coming out and the fact that the RCMP and Canada's spy agency were involved, tried to get answers about what was going on. Then it went into national security issues. As I said earlier, two committees of Parliament, plus this body itself, ordered the government to provide those unredacted documents to the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel so that they could be studied by, as you said, Mr. Speaker, a body that is supreme in this place, yet those documents were not provided in the manner in which they were requested.
It is somewhat disturbing that we have seen this systemic pattern, as I said earlier, of a government that has failed in many cases over the last six years to be transparent and accountable to what ultimately reigns supreme in this place, and that is Parliament. It is quite disturbing that we have come to this point.
We have seen that this is the government that ran in 2015 on the issue of transparency and accountability. Over the course of the government being in power, we have seen the WE situation. We have seen the Prime Minister charged with ethics violations and found guilty. The list of the government's violations of accountability and transparency is as long as the day. This has caused me as a parliamentarian, my constituents and Canadians in general to be extremely cynical about what the government is doing by not being transparent.
I know the government's argument and I have listened to some of the arguments tonight. The argument has been that this information would be provided to the national security committee, but as the Speaker ruled, it is not a committee of Parliament. I think it was important to make the distinction that it serves at the whim of the Prime Minister and the executive branch of the government, which, by virtue of that association, makes it unaccountable to this Parliament. The information that the committee can create and develop is only given to the Prime Minister. That means that Canadians run the risk of not having that information available to them.
We do not naively think that national security is not important. We all know that the first and primary role of government, any level of government, is to make sure that its citizens are secure. That is why, in the best interests of our national security, both the committee and Parliament itself in its order made sure that there would be processes in place to protect information.
Mr. Speaker, this motion that we are debating tonight as a result of your ruling today is a critical one to indicate to the government that it cannot just run roughshod over parliamentary authority.
There have been examples of that in the past. An example that occurred when this pandemic first started was brought up earlier tonight. One of the first pieces of legislation that the government tried to introduce was an attempt to impose unreserved, unconditional tax and spending powers that would have effectively made Parliament irrelevant until January 2022. If it were not for the opposition, all of us, and if it were not for Canadians and journalists pushing back on this power grab by the government, I would hate to think where we would be today. It is not surprising to me and it should not surprise any Canadian when the Prime Minister says that there is something about China's basic dictatorship that he likes and admires. He was not kidding. We have seen this pattern over and over again over the course of the last six years.
Mr. Speaker, I want to conclude by thanking you for protecting this institution, for being the last line of defence in our democracy and for being there for Canadians.