Question of Privilege
Speaker’s Ruling Reserved
April 11, 2019
Honourable senators, I am now prepared to hear further new arguments in relation to the Question of Privilege raised by Senator Plett. I want to repeat, though, honourable senators, as I said yesterday, I will only entertain matters that are new to the debate. I do not want to hear further comments with respect to individual senators, groups, caucuses, or a rehash of the arguments that we had when the Question of Privilege was raised at the first order.
New information, Senator Plett.
Thank you, Your Honour. I will indeed be very brief.
Further to the question of privilege which I raised in the Senate Chamber, I would like to make a point of clarification and provide some additional information. In my letter of notice to the Clerk of the Senate, and in my address to the Senate on this matter, I noted that by 2 p.m. that afternoon, the full details of the agreement had been leaked to the media and a copy of the signed document had been posted on Twitter by Dale Smith. It has been brought to my attention that the 2 p.m. time stamp I referred to was in Pacific time.
I’m not very literate when it comes to IT information, but apparently mobile devices display the time when a tweet was posted in local time, but a desktop computer displays the time in Pacific time. What this means is that the tweet was posted not at 2 p.m. but at 5 p.m. local time.
In order to verify that this was the case, I had my staff do two things: First, they did a test post on Twitter and immediately checked the time stamp. On a mobile phone, the time stamp was correct. On a computer, the time stamp indicated the tweet had been posted three hours earlier, which was obviously incorrect.
Second, my staff contacted Dale Smith, the journalist who made the Twitter post, to verify what time he made the tweet in question. Mr. Smith confirmed that he tweeted at 5 p.m., not 2 p.m.
This information, colleagues, is significant because Senator Woo told this chamber that if the tweet was posted at 2 p.m., his decision to break the trust of the others involved in the negotiations and distribute a copy of the confidential agreement with all the ISG senators could not have resulted in the leak.
We now know this is incorrect because Senator Woo admitted that he provided copies of the confidential document to members of the Independent Senators Group shortly after 4 p.m., and the document appeared on Twitter at 5 p.m.
However, colleagues, allow me to clarify one additional item: The question of privilege which I raised does not primarily pertain to whether Senator Woo shared the confidential document with Dale Smith. The question is whether he shared it with anyone outside of his most immediate advisers. By his own admission, he has done so, sharing it with all the ISG senators.
Colleagues, at least twice during this debate on this matter on Tuesday, members opposite spoke about staff having done certain things. They were implicating other senators’ staff other than their own. Colleagues, I do not think it is proper for us to talk about people in this chamber who have no method of defending themselves.
Your Honour, I thank you for the opportunity to bring this additional information to the chamber. I look forward to your ruling on this matter.
Honourable senators, I wish to respond briefly to Senator Plett’s intervention. I’m grateful he is offering a correction of his mistake concerning timelines in his original letter to the Speaker.
Along with all senators, I was misled by the information he provided. I would note, however, that Senator Plett’s case was built on the presumption of a 2 p.m. tweet by the journalist. He now understands that case to be flawed because ISG senators did not receive the document in question until 4 p.m., and therefore the causality would have been impossible. As a result, he is offering a fresh account of how the document was leaked to the media.
He says, in his latest intervention, that the tweet “could have” originated from me. Well, colleagues, that is speculation. It is the same order of speculation as me saying it could have originated from him, or that it could have originated from one of his caucus colleagues, or it could have originated from a Conservative staffer.
Perhaps we will get another clarification of the timing of the tweet. Regardless of when the tweet was sent, his argument boils down to this: It could have been Senator Woo.
I’m offended by the wild and baseless nature of this allegation, which could itself be considered a breach of my privilege.
Colleagues, if “could have” is the basis on which a breach of privilege can be found, we should brace ourselves for an avalanche of privilege questions.
I would add one more new point: The extent to which the document I shared with ISG colleagues is confidential has not even been determined. Unfortunately, both Senator Plett and I, and all other participants at that meeting, are constrained from saying more about what we agreed to because that would in itself violate the confidentiality of our discussions.
All I can tell you is that I shared the document with ISG members in good conscience and in a belief that it was consistent with what was agreed to at that meeting.
Let me reiterate: I did not leak the document to the media.
Yet, honourable senators, the extent to which the document is confidential and what time a certain journalist tweeted it out are not central to the matter that the Speaker must resolve, which is the question of whether a prima facie breach of privilege has been established. Several of our colleagues have already argued in detail that all four criteria set out in the Rules have not been met. I will not repeat those arguments, except to say that this point of privilege is not only unfounded, but it is frivolous and vexatious and has been a waste of precious Senate time.
Senator Martin, do you have something new to add to the two facts that were presented?
Yes, if I may add a few facts.
I’m not interested in a debate. I’m only interested in facts at this stage.
I want to explain a few important facts for the day that we’re talking about. As the deputy leader, I naturally work very closely with the leader and our leadership team and was aware that Senator Plett was also part of those discussions.
I had communicated with my caucus about the importance of not doing anything on social or traditional media on that day because our aim was to have the motion withdrawn and no one in the chamber tweet or talk about it so as to potentially ignite another debate. As we know, in this chamber, if something slightly goes against what we all understood would be happening, the whole thing could go off the rails. We could potentially jeopardize this very important timeline we needed to agree to.
As the deputy leader, I had communicated this to members of my caucus, and Senator Housakos, who is very active on social media — he sits right next to me — so I recall reminding him and saying that everyone should honour the agreement and not add anything into the public sphere because we had not yet shared that timeline with our caucus. I know the leaders had, but our groups had not been privy to the same information.
In fact, the timeline is similar to what had already been previously discussed, but the fact is that no one in our caucus had a copy of the signed document. That is why it was concerning to me to see it on that day — a tweet by Dale Smith — and it was retweeted, and we talked about those items. I wanted to share that was my experience as deputy leader trying to keep to the agreement to the best of our ability. I was concerned when the tweet went out that something could happen because I had not even shared that with our caucus members.
I wanted to add that to the debate.
I thank honourable senators for their additional input. I will take it under advisement.
