Mr. Speaker, indeed, I am rising on a question of privilege.

I would like to briefly respond to yesterday's intervention by the member for Kingston and the Islands. His intervention was in response to the question of privilege I raised in the House on June 7, which made reference to the fact that the Public Health Agency of Canada did not comply with the order of the House of June 2 to turn over critical documents in a case that every Canadian is interested in, that of the laboratory in Winnipeg.

We have a number of important elements to address. First, the member cited page 986 of House of Commons Procedure and Practice, third edition, concerning the three options that a committee has when a person or organization does not turn over documents.

The comments by the member for Kingston and the Islands were interesting. The problem is that he read the first and second option, but not the third.

Let me complete the citation by adding the third option. “The third option is to reject the reasons given for denying access to the record and uphold the order to produce the entire record.”

Second, the member claimed that security safeguards are “nowhere to be found” in my proposed privilege motion. This is simply not true. He based his argument on the motion that I offered to the House last week and not on the draft motion.

As you know, page 145 of Bosc and Gagnon states that a member raising a question of privilege should provide, as part of the written notice to you, the text of the motion that is proposed to be moved. The draft motion, which was attached to the notice I provided to you last week, refers in part to the health minister “delivering up the documents ordered by this House on June 2, 2021, so that they may be deposited with the Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel under the terms of that order.”

In any event, whether the House may demand redacted or unredacted documents, with or without security precautions, is something for the House to determine and is not a procedural prerequisite. Regardless, this is obviously a red herring from the Liberals because they have shown no interest to date, in response to three different orders with security safeguards, in producing these documents.

Finally, the member has called upon you to exercise your authority under page 150 of Bosc and Gagnon in such a way to allow me to put forward one of two motions: either hold the government in contempt or refer the matter to the procedure and House affairs committee. Of course, the hon. member for Kingston and the Islands overlooks, for example, the 1891 case of Michael Connolly, recounted at page 121 of Bosc and Gagnon, which I discussed with you last week. In brief, the House ordered Mr. Connolly to the bar of the House when he had refused to turn over documents that the committee required.

Reading between the lines, it appears quite clearly that the Liberal government is trying to say that the House simply does not have the authority to consider a motion that could enable it to obtain information that it ordered the government to produce, when the government is refusing to do so.

In fact, if we accept this view of things, as the member for Kingston and the Islands proposed, that logic invariably leads to this situation. The government declares that it has a veto on the tabling and publication of all documents.

Under the member's proposed arrangement, he could choose to comply to have yet another committee discuss their intransigence or to be found in contempt. Nowhere among the options that the government contemplates would the House actually get the documents it ordered.

To allow that would be to allow the government to frustrate the objectives of the House in securing the information it requires to discharge its constitutional responsibility of holding the government to account. To allow the government's claim to succeed would not, in my respectful opinion, be consistent with your duties as the guardian of the House's rights and privileges.

Gérard Deltell

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