Mr. Speaker, I just want to add some further commentary to the question of privilege that is currently before the Chair and to rebut some of the arguments offered yesterday by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons concerning my question of privilege about the apparent leak of details in Bill C-40.
The key thrust of the parliamentary secretary's argument was, basically, “trust me”. I agree with him that, consistent with the traditions of the House, we take members at their word. To that end, I accept that the parliamentary secretary himself did not leak the content of Bill C-40. The “comprehensive investigation” which he spoke about frequently, but not extensively, is another matter. The parliamentary secretary gave no insight into the scope or thoroughness of the so-called investigation, just that it happened and nothing was found, but how hard did they look?
In 2001, after details about the Anti-terrorism Act 2001 had been leaked to Bob Fife ahead of its introduction in Parliament, in addition to Mr. Speaker Milliken finding a prima facie case of privilege, as referenced in my original intervention, the Privy Council Office initiated its own investigation.
The Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, in its 40th report, outlined what was involved with that investigation:
Mr. Fadden explained that the Privy Council Office had initiated an administrative review of the unauthorized disclosure of information regarding the anti-terrorist legislation, and contracted with the firm of Deloitte & Touche. The final report, dated November 20, 2001, was provided to the Committee. It indicated that, during the period October 25, 2001 to November 20, 2001, Deloitte & Touche itself had conducted 53 interviews, including 11 Ministers, and Departmental Security Officers had conducted 419 interviews, for a total of 472. These were people who had been identified as being involved in the drafting process, the review process and the roll-out and communications process of the bill. The Deloitte & Touche report indicates that nine persons interviewed admitted to having spoken with the media with respect to what became Bill C-36, but only four spoke with either Mr. Fife or [Luiza] Chwialkowska. Of these four, three persons admitted having spoken to the two journalists in the few days prior to the appearance of the article in the National Post on October 13, 2001. All nine persons adamantly denied having provided any unauthorized information to the media in general, or to Mr. Fife or Ms. Chwialkowska in particular.
Four hundred and seventy-two professional interviews compared to who knows what, but take him on his word. He insists.
Next, I want to turn to the argument he offered that the government had never really decided to pick a lane on structuring the Defence Investment Agency. Let us look at the actual sequence of events that he scattered throughout his intervention.
On April 27, Doug Guzman, the Defence Investment Agency's Chief Executive Officer, told the Standing Committee on National Defence that there were “a number of ways” in which the Defence Investment Agency could be set up, including a Crown corporation. According to the parliamentary secretary, this was a sign that there was “still a live debate within the government.”
Fair enough, but the very next day, April 28, the government answered the question and settled the debate when the Minister of Finance and National Revenue laid upon the table the 2026 Spring Economic Update. On pages 82 and 145, the minister signalled the government's intention to establish the Defence Investment Agency as a “stand-alone entity”. That policy announcement assumed legislative expression through the introduction of Bill C-31 on May 6, which the following day, the minister referred to in a press release as making good on the government's pressures, among others, “establishing the Defence Investment Agency as a stand-alone entity”.
The government had never made any statements here in Parliament or, indeed, anywhere else, repudiating its policy or its proposals in Bill C-31, currently before the Standing Committee on Finance, that is, until Bill C-40 was tabled. Let us be honest about what actually happened. Mr. Guzman threatened to rage-quit from the government because of his impatience with public servants, something we also know because of sourced reporting on the pages of The Globe and Mail, and Bill C-40 suddenly became an urgent Liberal measure to keep the Prime Minister's Bay Street pal kicking around Ottawa.
I worry that the parliamentary secretary might find himself in trouble if the Prime Minister actually catches wind of his argument yesterday. The most frequent Liberal spokesperson in the House has basically stood up and told the world that we cannot rely on government decisions announced in Parliament, that we cannot rely on the word of the finance minister, given a mere seven sitting weeks earlier, and that we cannot assume that legislation introduced by the finance minister six sitting weeks earlier represents the actual policy of the government.
For a government that is making a big show about negotiating foreign deals and seeking foreign investment while talking about other governments signing agreements in pencil, the parliamentary secretary's argument that we should not rely on federal government announcements, economic updates and budget implementing legislation as authoritative representations of government policy is actually quite chilling. In the current era of heightened global uncertainty, it is what is called “political risk”, which has fundamentally driven many business and economic considerations of late.
For his part, the parliamentary secretary has single-handedly signalled to investment markets that they need to recalculate Canada's political risk, because the finance minister's word and the government's word apparently cannot be relied upon even in the short term. Alternatively, the parliamentary secretary is saying that in the government's pecking order, Mr. Guzman actually outranks the finance minister and that we should value their respective pronouncements accordingly. Either way, it is not good.
Finally, another argument the parliamentary secretary offered is that the media got it all wrong and therefore there could not have been any leak because it was reported that the legislation would provide for an associate minister of national defence, when in fact Bill C-40 would create the position of associate minister of national defence for procurement. This sounds like a distinction without a difference. If anything, the phrase “associate minister” is the dead giveaway, the smoking gun, that there was a leak of details found within the bill. The phrase is a very precise and specific expression. It is very much an inside baseball term in the Ottawa field known as the “machinery of government”. The phrase was nowhere in the defence procurement lexicon until the night before Bill C-40 was introduced. It certainly was not in any of the quotations offered by the parliamentary secretary yesterday.
All told, Mr. Speaker, I would urge you to give the parliamentary secretary's intervention the appropriate weight, namely an acknowledgement that he himself did not leak Bill C-40 to The Globe and Mail or the CBC. When we strip away the verbiage of his intervention, we are left with a threadbare argument by a government seemingly desperate to avoid any committee investigation related to the leak of this bill.