Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes.
I am pleased to rise this evening to speak to our privilege motion, which I am going to take the time to reread for those who are watching at home. This is what we are calling for:
That the House find 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, 2021, and, accordingly, order its President to attend at 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 the 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.
As we can see from reading this privilege motion, this is an extremely important issue for democracy and respect for the authority of the House.
Today, sadly, we are not surprised by the way this government has acted over the last five, almost six, years. However, rarely in over 150 years have such events occurred in the House of Commons. Such a profound lack of respect for the institution will go down in history, but for the wrong reasons.
I would like to come back to the issue at hand. How did we get to where we are today? First of all, this all started with a CBC news story in July 2019 reporting that two Chinese scientists had been expelled from the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, a level 4 facility. This news came as a surprise to us, but it was a bit nebulous as we were unsure, waiting for more information. Meanwhile, the COVID‑19 pandemic began, and we went into “COVID mode” all through 2020.
During that time, the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations was doing a study on Hong Kong. Later, after passing a motion I presented to the committee, it undertook a study on national security in Canada-China relations. This study included evaluating various levels and aspects of security, like defence. One of the points studied just happened to be the relationship between China and the Public Health Agency of Canada, and that is where everything began to point to the problem we face today.
On March 22, the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada, Iain Stewart, appeared before the committee, only to tell us that he would say nothing. Committee members exchanged some glances and asked the usual questions about various files, but especially about Winnipeg. The agency remained secretive and we had no way of finding out anything at all. As a result, we became suspicious and questions were asked.
Then we asked for an emergency committee meeting on March 31 and summoned the House of Commons law clerk, Philippe Dufresne, and the deputy law clerk, Michel Bédard. We asked them for advice. We asked them to explain our rights and how to exercise those rights. They explained the procedure and said it was normal for a committee like the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations to ask questions and get the documents it sends for.
At that same meeting, we moved a motion calling on the Public Health Agency of Canada to turn the required documents over to the law clerks so they could redact personal information and anything to do with national security.
Several weeks later, we got another surprise. The agency produced documents, and those documents were redacted, but not by our House of Commons law clerks. The president of the agency and his team had taken it upon themselves to decide what should be redacted.
On May 10, the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations held another meeting, which was attended by the law clerks, who are officers of the House, and the president of the Public Health Agency of Canada with his lawyer. We asked them to explain the process to us, and the law clerks once again clarified that it was their job to analyze documents provided by a government agency because they had the authority and credentials to do that analysis.
That is great, so why did they not proceed that way? At that same meeting on May 10, there was another surprise when the Liberal member for Cumberland—Colchester moved a motion calling for the documents to be provided, for the law clerks to do their job and, if that did not work, for the matter to be referred to the House of Commons. What was bound to happen did happen; once again, that did not work, and the matter was referred to House.
After the debate on the motion in the House on June 2, the House adopted an order requiring the Public Health Agency of Canada and its president to provide the documents, as requested, to the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations.
Someone, somewhere, then had the idea to send the documents to the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, simply to get the job done and be able to say that the documents had been sent to a committee.
The order of the House called for the documents to be sent to the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations, which has law clerks in place who can do the work. Despite that, the documents were sent to the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians in an effort to have Canadians believe that this committee could do the work because it included Conservative members and now Bloc members. This was done in the hope that everyone would be happy.
However, that is an ultra-secret committee. The two Conservative members and the one Bloc member who serve on it must keep quiet for the rest of their lives about anything they might learn, see or hear. They will eventually conduct an analysis and submit a report to the Prime Minister, although he will not learn anything new, since he already has the information and knows what happened in Winnipeg, as do all government members. Sending this to the committee of parliamentarians is a charade. Three opposition members who are sworn to secrecy for the rest of their lives will know what happened, but they can never tell, so nothing will ever come of it.
It is quite obvious that this is the government's plan. This is yet another affront to the House of Commons, because that committee of parliamentarians has nothing to do with this file and because it is not a parliamentary committee like other House of Commons committees. Furthermore, this violates the order given to submit the documents to the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations.
Not only is it an affront to parliamentarians, but it is also an affront to officers of Parliament, which shocks me. Law Clerk Philippe Dufresne and Deputy Law Clerk Michel Bédard are members of the House of Commons team, just like the clerks. They are not elected members or members of the opposition. They are members of the staff who were chosen on the basis of their skills and abilities to deal with information so as to ensure that security and personal information are protected. Why would we not trust our law clerks and submit the documents to them as requested? These documents would have been processed and submitted to the Special Committee on Canada-China Relations according to the rules. Why play around with that?
This means that there is an even more serious problem and that something dangerous beyond our imagination happened between the Winnipeg lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese army. There is something very serious going on. The Liberals' manoeuvres are only amplifying the problem, making the situation more sensitive and creating a huge issue.
The Conservatives do not want to fearmonger. We simply want to know what happened. There are ways to talk with the opposition. We are all Canadians, no matter our political allegiances. We all have the right to know what happens here in our country.