Conservative MPs say the Liberals wasted no time in shutting down public debate at two House of Commons committees after securing their parliamentary majority this week.
On Tuesday, the health and ethics committees welcomed new Liberal MPs, giving the government a majority of members.
Minutes into both meetings, the Liberal members used their majorities to send the debates into closed-door sessions.
“That means that the media get kicked out, the public can’t watch online,” said Conservative ethics critic Michael Barrett.
He added that once the committee meetings were moved in camera, committee members were barred from speaking publicly about what happened behind closed doors.
“It’s going to make it more difficult for us to be able to bring that accountability to bear and that’s a choice that Liberals have made,” Barrett said.
Tory health critic Dan Mazier said he was shocked to see Liberal MPs vote to move debate in-camera.
“It’s very disheartening to see the Liberals go to this degree of kind of authoritarianism,” he said.
Mazier was planning to call on the health committee to ask the auditor general to investigate a program called PrescribeIT that’s set to be scrapped next month.
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The $300-million program was launched in 2017. It was supposed to modernize doctors’ offices and phase out things like fax machines, but reporting by the Globe and Mail suggests it’s barely being used.
Canada Health Infoway, the federally funded not-for-profit organization that runs PrescribeIT, says the program is set to end May 29 as it transitions to an “an open-standards approach” for electronic prescriptions.
Mazier said he wanted answers about how the money was spent and why the program wasn’t working.
“We were going to ask the auditor general to come in and do an investigation and Liberal Maggie Chi voted to shut down the cameras,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
The recording of the health committee meeting shows that Bloc Québécois member Maxime Blanchette-Joncas tried to ask Chi why she was voting to move the meeting in camera.
The Liberal chair said the question wasn’t allowed because members already had been asked to vote on Chi’s request to move the meeting behind closed doors.
Chi has not responded to an email requesting more information.
Mazier said in an interview that the move was “a slap in the face to every voter and every part of our democracy.”
“This was mounting up to a major scandal, and (the Liberals) knew that, but they said, ‘Trust us, this isn’t a power grab,’” he said.
Liberal members of the health committee refused to answer reporters’ questions about the move on their way into the weekly caucus meeting Wednesday.
Liberal House leader Steven MacKinnon shrugged off the questions, saying committees are “masters of their own agenda.”
“No one’s shutting down debate,” he said. “We’re having lots of debate every day on a very ambitious legislative agenda.”
— With files from Nick Murray
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