Achi news desk-
For a committee tasked with reviewing an emergency, the method of reporting back to Canada has been less than urgent.
The previous group of parliamentarians and MPs studying the federal government’s application to the Emergencies Act for the “Freedom Convoy” was due to present its findings in December.
December 2022, that is.
There was a huge pile of documents that had to be translated into the two official languages ​​before they could be considered stopping their work, and as one senator said this week, waiting for that bottleneck could take a very long time.
“I don’t think people are waiting with bated breath for our work,” said Sen. Peter Harder.
“But they will be asleep for a long time by the time we work on that sequence.”
Now that an index of the documents has been drawn up in both official languages ​​- which in itself is hundreds of pages long – the members of the committee have agreed that the hard journey towards putting pen to paper will continue o’ end on May 21.
The committee has had more than its share of starts and stops.
First, he extended the deadline of his original report to receive more written submissions.
Then came the fateful June 2023 decision that all documents produced for the Public Order Emergencies Commission, which had released its own final report months earlier, should be available in English and French.
For convenience, the commission itself had chosen not to do so, with some documents only available in one language. He ultimately concluded that the government’s use of the act was justified.
Translating the thousands of documents was expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take several years.
The CEO of the Translation Bureau told the committee at a meeting in February this year that translating even just a portion of the requested documents would have involved about 124,000 pages, costing about $16 million.
Now that the committee has an index, it will be more selective which documents need to be translated.
At this week’s meeting, 18 months after the deadline for their first report, the members reached the point of discussing whether they should continue to wait for more translations at all.
At the very least, NDP MP Matthew Green suggested, the committee should go back to work on a report while it waits for everything to come in.
Otherwise the work could extend to 2025 and closer to the dissolution of the Senedd before a federal election which must take place by October of that year.
“I think it is irresponsible for us to continue to pursue this committee forever,” he said.
Conservative MP Larry Brock said the committee could “walk and chew gum at the same time,” but he did not feel comfortable producing a report without “the full participation of my francophone colleagues.”
Senator Claude Carignan, speaking in French, said he had no problem with the goal of finishing the report early this fall, but the committee needs to see the evidence.
He said he has identified a number of documents he wants to see.
“We have to have access to the documents in order to have a solid proof of our report and to have a complete and thorough report,” he said.
Green argued that the committee has heard testimony from its own witnesses and has its own mandate – and is not supposed to be a “book report club on the Rouleau commission.”
Bloc MP Rhéal Fortin said in French that it makes sense to use evidence from the commission, “but we have to have it in both official languages.”
He asked if his anglophone colleagues would “say we don’t need all this” if all the information was in French.
In the end, the committee reached a compromise and agreed to resume work.
But it is not troublesome to set a new deadline.
This report was first published by The Canadian Press on May 4, 2024.
