Senator, is there apt to be some overlap between the two? Yes, there is. Does that offend me? No, it doesn't. Could you find that your committee reaches different conclusions from an independent inquiry? Yes. I'm not offended by that either. I think that's healthy in a democracy.
I think what is important as you look at your work is that we deliberately wrote in the need for Parliament to immediately deal with the proclamation of the emergency. That was to ensure that Parliament was engaged, and we wanted it to act very quickly.
What we had learned, though, from the War Measures Act was that much information came out after that time about the nature of the crisis in Quebec and how it was being handled by the authorities.
You have access today to information that Parliament didn't have at the time that it voted. For example, the statement of the commissioner of the OPP that a week before the act was invoked, the provincial government had found that there was a threat to the security of Canada. That wasn't common knowledge at the time that Parliament voted. It's appropriate for you to look at that and to examine the basis on which that finding was made.
If you find, as a result of that, that it justifies what the government did, that's good. If you find that the government made this decision based on fallacious information, then that's appropriate for you to look at as well in my view. It's also appropriate for the courts to consider and for the ex post facto review to look at as well.
The distinction I would make about the ex post facto review is that it was designed to be...after all the dust had settled. You could pull back and have some perspective and look at a very wide range of issues such as, for example, the structure of policing in Ottawa, which I mentioned earlier.