Thank you for the question and thank you for your time.
I think there are two parts to the question: One is what the commission did and one is what we have done in the past nine months or whatever the period has been.
In terms of what the commission did, I'm really not in a position to speak for what Justice Rouleau did. I cannot speak to the independent commission and how it structured itself and how it did its work. I can reiterate that it provided a 2,000-page report in both official languages and that there was public interpretation, but I appreciate that there are other questions that I'm not in a position to answer about what the commission did.
In terms of us, I am deeply committed to finding a solution to this. This is not my first time coming to a parliamentary committee. I am often guided by.... We have a document called “Open and Accountable Government”, which was created under a previous government and has been reiterated by the current government. There's a passage in there talking about confidential information and cabinet confidences, but I think the theme applies, and the theme is really that we should be working with committees to find solutions and provide answers, and not simply say we can't provide information.
My goal, certainly today, and I think in those letters—one of them is from Alex, who is with me—is in a conciliatory way to find a solution. I don't know why there was a delay in that first letter. I apologize. I don't know the exact timing. Since I have been involved, we have sent two letters to try to explain what your request means.
On that first request I'd mentioned, using the math that our colleagues mentioned earlier—one month for 16,000 documents—we're talking years and years and years to be able to provide the entire amount, and so we wanted to make sure the committee understood that and to offer other options. We offered to translate the evidence and said that would take $16 million and this period of time.
One thing I would like to point out is that we have not been sitting doing nothing. We have been working to go through a set of documents—we had no idea what was in there—to try to itemize them a little bit better, and that's why today I can offer to give you a list in very short order.