Mr. Speaker, I hate to alert my hon. colleague that I will ask a question that challenges something he said, but I want to put on the record, first, that I agree with virtually everything he said.
I also want to thank the hon. member for South Shore—St. Margarets because, from corridor conversations, I am quite aware that he seems to have done a whole lot of late-night, red-eyed reading through a lot of documents I have not had the time to read.
What we have here is a very large and important issue. I look forward to speaking to it later in debate today. I am very concerned with charter rights, but I fail to see a charter right being infringed here. I am open to debate to understand how the hon. Leader of the Government in the House of Commons sees a charter right infringement; however, to me, the right of the House to see documents and convey them to the RCMP does not raise a charter issue.
The quibble I have with my hon. friend, the member for Chilliwack—Hope, is just because I like to see things corrected on the record. I was here during the debates that we had right at the beginning of COVID. It was on March 23, actually. The hon. leader of the official opposition now was the finance critic for the Conservative Party back then. I would like to say how much fun we had working together. We did, actually. The hon. leader, the hon. member for New Westminster—Burnaby, the hon. Bloc Québécois critic for finance and I met regularly with former finance minister Bill Morneau. The hon. member for New Westminster—Burnaby was the New Democrat finance critic at the time.
We had astonishing levels of agreement, but it was not the now official opposition leader who spotted the little nugget. Everybody spotted it. As the leader of the Green Party, I promise that I spotted it. We went against parliamentary tradition because of COVID. Draft government legislation was shared with us before first reading. We all saw it. The parliamentary budget office flagged it. The former finance minister could not give himself the right to approve budgets several budgets in advance, so it never came to the House.