OTTAWA — The weeks-long logjam will continue.
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Glaring redactions in newly delivered documents concerning the Liberals’ green slush fund scandal means the ongoing gridlock in the House of Commons will continue, Opposition House Leader Andrew Scheer said on Tuesday.
“We are yet again faced with a situation where the Trudeau Liberals are choosing to keep Parliament paralyzed with this scandal,” Scheer told reporters in the foyer of the House of Commons.
“They would rather grind Parliament to a halt than hand over documents related to this scandal to the RCMP.”
In a letter Monday to the Speaker from Parliamentary Law Clerk Michel Bedard, he said three government agencies — Statistics Canada, Science and Economic Development (ISED), and the National Research Council (NRC) — provided him with additional related documents earlier this month.
But those documents, like the ones that triggered the current quagmire, were heavily redacted.
“All three government institutions provided documents containing redactions and/or withheld some pages purportedly relying on the Access to Information Act,” the letter read.
Since the beginning of October, the House has been in procedural gridlock courtesy of a Conservative privilege motion tabled after the Liberals violated a production order demanding unredacted documents surrounding the now-defunct Sustainable Development Technology Canada’s (SDTC) billion-dollar “green slush fund.”
The Conservatives say they intend to hand over unredacted documents directly to the RCMP.
Documents turned over via that production order were either heavily redacted or missing entirely, prompting House Speaker Greg Fergus to rule the government in violation of parliamentary privilege.
Earlier this year, Auditor General Karen Hogan ruled SDTC violated conflict of interest rules 90 times, awarding millions of dollars in lucrative government contracts for projects that not only weren’t eligible for funding, some cases had nothing to do with green technology.
Under a minority government, the privilege motion remains the only business on the order paper until debate collapses or the Liberals can convince either the Bloc Quebecois or NDP to support a closure motion, something neither party seems interested in entertaining.
The Liberals have said they want the matter settled in committee, not in the House of Commons.
Scheer said the letter proves the government has no intention of complying with the order.
“Clearly, the government is picking and choosing which documents it hands over,” Scheer told reporters.
“They’re literally keeping some documents away from the RCMP and hiding, covering up and redacting many of these documents.”
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