Mr. Speaker, this debate has been going on for some time. We have gone through the original motion and an amendment and now we are dealing with a subamendment to the motion. It all refers back to a previous motion, which was adopted on June 10 in the House of Commons, so I thought it might be helpful to go back and review the wording of those motions to make sure that we all know what is being discussed.
Back in June, here was the question before the House:
That the House order the government, Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) and the Auditor General of Canada each to deposit with the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel, within 14 days of the adoption of this order, the following documents, created or dated since January 1, 2017, which are in its or her possession, custody or control:
(a) all files, documents, briefing notes, memoranda, e-mails or any other correspondence exchanged among government officials regarding SDTC;
(b) contribution and funding agreements to which SDTC is a party;
(c) records detailing financial information of companies in which past or present directors or officers of SDTC had ownership, management or other financial interests;
(d) SDTC conflict of interest declarations;
(e) minutes of SDTC's Board of Directors and Project Review Committee; and
(f) all briefing notes, memoranda, e-mails or any other correspondence exchanged between SDTC directors and SDTC management;
provided that,
(g) the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel shall promptly thereafter notify the Speaker whether each entity produced documents as ordered, and the Speaker, in turn, shall forthwith inform the House of the notice of the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel but, if the House stands adjourned, the Speaker shall lay the notice upon the table pursuant to Standing Order 32(1); and
(h) the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel shall provide forthwith any documents received by him, pursuant to this order, to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for its independent determination of whether to investigate potential offences under the Criminal Code or any other act of Parliament.
This was voted on in a somewhat amended format. I will read the amendment proposed by the hon. member for Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup. The motion was amended slightly by changing “14 days” to “30 days”, to give the government more time to comply, and through the following:
(b) by adding the word “and” at the end of paragraph (f), and by adding, after paragraph (f), the following new paragraph: “(g) in the case of the Auditor General of Canada, any other document, not described in paragraphs (a) to (f), upon which she relied in preparing her Report 6—Sustainable Development Technology Canada, which was laid upon the table on Tuesday, June 4, 2024;”....
Then there was a further adjustment to paragraph (h), which was to delete all the words after the word “Police”.
That was voted on, and in the division on June 10, 171 of us voted yea and 150 voted nay. All of the nays, of course, were from members of the Liberal caucus. The other parties supported it.
This produced a series of reports from various government departments and agencies, which were tabled in the House of Commons as required. The Clerk then submitted the material to the Speaker, who reported back to the House, and it was at that point, over the course of the summer, that we learned numerous departments either had completely failed to comply by submitting literally nothing or, in other cases, had submitted heavily redacted documents.
That failure of compliance was the basis for another motion, which was introduced in the House upon our return. This was in the name of the opposition House leader. The motion is, “That the government's failure of fully providing documents, as ordered by the House on June 10, 2024, be hereby referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs”.
Initially, there was a question of privilege about this. That led to the Speaker's ruling that this was a prima facie case of privilege and also an injunction to us to refer it to the procedure and House affairs committee.
Based on that, this motion was put forward. It was subsequently amended to read as follows:
provided that it be an instruction to the committee:
(a) that the following witnesses be ordered to appear before the committee, separately, for two hours each:
(i) the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry,
(ii) the Clerk of the Privy Council,
(iii) the Auditor General of Canada,
(iv) the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
(v) the Deputy Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada,
(vi) the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel of the House of Commons,
(vii) the Acting President of Sustainable Development Technology Canada,
(viii) a panel consisting of the Board of Sustainable Development Technology Canada; and
(b) that it report back to the House no later than Friday, November 22, 2024.
I made remarks addressing this amendment about two weeks ago.
Subsequent to that time, a subamendment was moved in the name of the member for Flamborough—Glanbrook to change one of the subparagraphs regarding the list of witnesses who are to appear before the committee for two hours each. The amendment would add “the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, who respected the order of the House and deposited unredacted documents,” and “Paul MacKinnon, former Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, [responsible for] (Governance),”.
What we are debating now is the subamendment dealing with these two gentlemen. The thing that is striking about this is that the Privacy Commissioner, unlike so many other individuals who were expected to produce these documents, respected the order of the House and deposited unredacted documents.
When I listen to what is being said on the far side of the House by the government members, they act as if it is a horrendous breach of privacy, of civil rights, of civil liberties, of charter rights, of the ways in which we conduct business respectfully and of individual rights here in Canada, to ask for such documents. They say darkly that we will be possibly damaging the ability to engage in criminal prosecution in the future, if these documents are presented in this manner, but the Privacy Commissioner did not think so.
I am going to guess that the Privacy Commissioner did not think so, in part because of the other individuals whose names are on that list. More to the point, the Privacy Commissioner probably anticipated that we would be hearing back from some of these other people. The Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel for the House of Commons is on that list of individuals who would testify before the procedure and House affairs committee. That individual would be able to shed light on the kinds of documents, without getting into the specifics, that have been presented and the kind of information that they reveal and could point out where it looks like the redactions have had the effect of removing evidence that really could not be characterized in any conceivable way as triggering the rights of which the Liberals have such a punctilious concern.
The commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would, likewise, be able to shed some light on that. Both the testimony of the individual in receipt of the documents, who is not going to be called forward as a prosecution witness and therefore can look at them objectively, without any danger with regard to future court proceedings, and the testimony of the commissioner of the RCMP, who can indicate exactly what kinds of concerns they need to have, are very significant safeguards. In all fairness, their names were not added to the list back when the Privacy Commissioner submitted full, unredacted documents, but presumably the Privacy Commissioner was able to anticipate, as an intelligent individual in his position would do, that this would be the case. That should be no surprise. This comes from the biography of the Privacy Commissioner, Philippe Dufresne, on the Privacy Commissioner's website:
He previously served as the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel of the House of Commons. In this capacity, he was the chief legal officer of the House of Commons and led the office responsible for the provision of legal and legislative drafting services to the House of Commons, its Speaker, Members and committees, the Board of Internal Economy and the House Administration.
Additionally, before that, “he was the Canadian Human Rights Commission’s Senior General Counsel”. If there are concerns about abstract human rights or procedural rights, which are some of the most important human rights, here is a guy who knows this stuff cold.
He successfully represented the Commission before all levels of Canadian Courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada, in a number of key human rights and constitutional cases over the last two decades. He has appeared before the Supreme Court on 15 occasions, on issues ranging from accessibility and equal pay for work of equal value, to the balancing of human rights and national security.
The Privacy Commissioner has far more expertise in this subject than any of the Liberal MPs I have seen addressing this question, and he felt safe releasing unredacted documents, understanding that these safeguards would be in place. That is quite striking; it is quite different from most of the other government agents who responded.
In all fairness, he is independent of government, unlike those departments that failed to submit, all of which report to ministers from the same government whose MPs now say that we ought to accept that these redactions are in the public interest; although, it seems more likely that they are in the interests of those individuals who have something to hide in this matter, and who may well have broken the law.
I assume the Privacy Commissioner understands his mandate. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has a mandate to provide “legal and policy analyses and expertise to help guide Parliament’s review of evolving legislation to ensure respect for individuals’ right to privacy”. Someone whose job is to do that said it is okay to release unredacted documents and demonstrated that through his own provision of such documents. Also, his mandate is “providing legal opinions and litigating court cases to advance the interpretation and application of federal privacy laws”.
I think these are pretty strong pieces of evidence. The evidence we have from the initial report back on June 4 from the Auditor General indicates very strongly that there is something profoundly wrong with this fund that dwarfs any previous scandal of a similar sort because the numbers involved are so enormous. The sponsorship scandal that took place when a similar kind of fund was set up to be disbursed with very little oversight involved conflicts of interest and misallocated funds on a scale that is perhaps, I think I may be overstating things, 10% of the amount involved here. It might have been less than 10%. Here, an extraordinary proportion of funds seem to have been misallocated. The Auditor General selected, randomly, a subset of all the contracts and found that there were problems in a majority of those contracts, suggesting that the majority of the funds allocated may simply have gone to the wrong purposes entirely. Does this qualify as illegal use or merely as grotesquely inappropriate use, which is not illegal, thanks to rules that are so slipshod and so loosely written that it is almost impossible to fall afoul of them? That is a good question. I do not know. It is probably a little of each.
There is clearly a very profound problem here. We have some guidance that it is reasonable to seek full disclosure of all documentation. I simply am unable to determine what, other than a deliberate attempt at misdirection, lies behind all of the high-sounding assertions regarding procedural justice that keep on being mentioned by Liberal members when they urge us to be afraid of the implications of this very reasonable set of motions, amendments and subamendments.
