Erin O’Toole refuses to appoint conservative members to the parliamentary intelligence and national security committee.
The Conservative leader withdrew his party MPs from the committee last spring to protest the Liberal government’s refusal to hand over unedited documents related to the firing of two scientists from Canada’s maximum security laboratory.
In a Dec. 17 letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, O’Toole says the conservative boycott of the all-party national security committee, known as the NSICOP, will continue in the new session of Parliament until the wrappers are removed. documents.
Opposition parties came together last spring to order the Public Health Agency of Canada to hand over the documents to the now-defunct special committee on Canada-China relations.
Instead, the Liberal government turned them over to NSICOP, arguing that it was the most appropriate body to review sensitive material that could endanger national security.
That committee, created in 2017 specifically to review sensitive matters, submits classified reports to the prime minister, which are then presented to Parliament in edited form. Its members must have the maximum security authorization and are obliged to keep secrecy.
At the time, Speaker of the House of Commons Anthony Rota ruled that NSICOP is not a committee of Parliament and therefore not an acceptable alternative to having a committee of the Commons review the documents.
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In his letter, O’Toole says that NSICOP “has become a committee of the Prime Minister’s Office” and has been used by the Trudeau government “to avoid accountability and that is diminishing its credibility.”
He says changes to the legislation creating the committee are required to establish it as a standing committee of the Commons that reports to Parliament, not the prime minister.
“Until requested documents are deposited with the law clerk, as previously ordered, and until you agree to a nonpartisan effort to make a statutory change to governing NSICOP legislation, Conservatives will not participate in NSICOP,” it says. O’Toole.
Conservatives boycott the safety committee for refusing to publish documents about fired scientists. #CDNPoli #NML #PHAC #CPC
It suggests that NSICOP is not suitable to delve into the firing of the two scientists because, by law, it is prohibited to have access to any information related to an ongoing police investigation. PHAC has said the matter is related to “a possible violation of security protocols” and is under police investigation.
O’Toole also accuses the government of continuing “to defy the will of Parliament, which on four occasions ordered the production of documents” of the PHAC.
However, Rota has ruled that those orders expired when Parliament was dissolved in August for an election, ending all business before the House.
In June, the government asked the Federal Court to prohibit the disclosure of the documents, arguing that disclosure would be “detrimental to international relations or national defense or national security.”
He withdrew the case once the elections were called, since the order of the Chamber for the presentation of documents was no longer in force.
In the new parliamentary session after the elections, House of Government Leader Mark Holland said that liberals still believe that NSICOP is the appropriate body to examine the documents.
However, he has proposed a compromise: to create a special committee of all parties with security clearance to review the undrawn documents, with the help of an independent panel of three former judges who would determine what and how the material could be publicly disclosed without putting endangered national security.
The conservatives have rejected that proposal, while the NDP and Bloc Quebecois have not yet definitively responded.
O’Toole’s letter suggests that the Conservatives adhere to the original demand of the opposition parties that all undrawn documents be turned over to the Parliamentary paralegal, who should examine them to protect national security, although the committee’s parliamentarians Canada-China reserved the right to publicly release any redacted material of their choice.
The Canada-China committee, created at the behest of a Conservative motion in the last parliamentary session, no longer exists, so it’s unclear which committee Conservatives think should be in charge of the documents now.
Opposition parties believe the documents they have demanded will shed light on why scientists Xiangguo Qiu and her husband, Keding Cheng, were escorted out of Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory in July 2019 and subsequently fired last January.
They also want to see documents related to the transfer, overseen by Qiu, of the deadly Ebola and Henipah viruses to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology in March 2019.
Former PHAC chairman Iain Stewart had assured MPs that the transfer had nothing to do with the subsequent layoffs of Qiu and her husband and that there was no connection to COVID-19, which first appeared in the Chinese province. from Wuhan.
Opposition parties continue to suspect a link despite those assurances.
Last June, Stewart became the first non-politician in more than a century to be brought before the House bar to be reprimanded for his refusal to hand over the documents. He was appointed president of the National Research Council of Canada in October.
This Canadian Press report was first published on December 21, 2021.
Reference-www.nationalobserver.com