Mr. Speaker, I would like to start, as I have started a number of speeches throughout my career, by talking a bit about one of my favourite political philosophers and building on what the previous member said. He talked about more light. To me, that brought up one of the greatest allegories in the history of political philosophy, which is The Allegory of the Cave.
The Allegory of the Cave is of course foundational to political philosophy. It has been cited literally millions of times in the preceding 2,000 years. The Allegory of the Cave says to imagine children who, nearly since birth, instead of being raised in the sunlight of day, are put in front of a wall with a flame behind them, so the only thing they see are shadows on the wall. Because it is all they have ever seen, they believe that is reality. They have no possible way of knowing there is a great big world outside. All they see are these shadows of these puppets on the wall, and so they believe that what reality is.
As the story goes, as Socrates tells the story, one individual gets up and sees the outside world. He sees it is amazing and that there is so much than just shadows on the wall. The tragedy of the story is that, when he comes back, because his eyes have difficulty seeing in the dark, all the other prisoners think he has been blinded, so they never want to go outside in the world.
The relevance, as I am sure the member for Kingston and the Islands is about ready to raise a point of order, is that this is directly relevant to what is happening here, as we are just seeing the shadows. We have newspaper reports and little bits of the story. The Prime Minister is willing to explain and give the unredacted documents to a committee of parliamentarians but not a committee of Parliament. This is the very definition of seeing the shadows on the wall but not actually getting to see the reality.
With that, I would like to go through some of the chronology of what has happened here. This has not been a rush to order. This has not been any type of parliamentary tactic. The evidence being that the first issue occurred on March 31 when with the committee of Canada-China relations adopted a motion ordering the Public Health Agency of Canada to produce within 20 days unredacted copies of all the records of dismissal of the two individuals in question.
On April 26, what PHAC finally provided was heavily redacted. This goes against parliamentary sovereignty and parliamentary supremacy. Speaker Milliken ruled that Parliament has the absolute unmitigated right to demand whichever documents they have. It should also be noted Parliament did not demand these documents be publicly disclosed, but that they go to an officer of Parliament, the law clerk, an individual in whom I am sure all parliamentarians have the highest level of confidence, for review.
On May 10, the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations adopted a second motion ordering the production within 10 days of the unredacted copies of all documents related to the dismissal of Dr. Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Dr. Keding Cheng relating to the transfer of deadly viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The motion called for the documents to be reviewed in camera by the special committee with the law clerk of the House to determine what information was to be made public.
After the committee failed to receive that, on May 20, the Public Health Agency of Canada provided heavily redacted documents, which did not satisfy the order of May 10. On May 26, this matter was of course reported to the House, at which point we brought a motion for those additional documents. The motion of censure that is in question today—