Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.
As Mr. Eisler said, my name is Greg Jack, and I'm a senior analyst in the Communication and Consultations Secretariat at the Privy Council Office.
If it pleases the committee, I would like to speak briefly about two matters--the calls on security-related issues in the media, which Mr. Eisler mentioned, and the summary I wrote of one of those calls, dated March 15, 2006.
On the issue of the calls generally, in the spring of 2005 I began preparing informal summaries of these calls, which were chaired by Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada. The summaries were sent to security and intelligence analysts in the Privy Council Office, certain communications officials in the Privy Council Office, and the Prime Minister's Office.
The written summaries were to ensure that Privy Council Office policy officials could verify the accuracy of the responses. They were also intended to keep the Prime Minister's Office informed of emerging issues should they receive calls on the same subjects. As Mr. Eisler said, these weekly calls to departments dealt with communications issues and helped to ensure that media calls were responded to as promptly as possible.
If access to information requests were ever raised on these calls, it would only have been in cases where the release of the documents could be expected to require a communications response. I have never been, nor am I now, privy to the names of requesters.
On the second matter, I would like to provide you with some specific background on the call summary dated March 15, 2006, in which the issue of alleged CIA overflights was mentioned. Mr. Jim Bronskill of the Canadian Press had written numerous stories about this issue, beginning in November 2005. In fact, he was one of very few journalists in Canada writing about this issue on a regular basis, and was certainly writing about it with the greatest frequency.
In fact, when the issue of the summary first arose in the media, our quick check showed that he had written about eight to ten stories between November 2005 and February 2006. During that time period, he had even called me personally on this subject, as I was spokesperson at the time for the Privy Council Office.
During the March 15 conference call when Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness noted that they would shortly be releasing an access to information request on the issue of alleged CIA overflights, it was assumed that Mr. Bronskill could be writing a story on the issue. It was this assumption that was reflected in the communications summary.
The assumption was based on the reporter's well-documented interest in the issue and was in no way based on any information received from the access to information office at PCO or anyone else about the identity of the requester. Again, I have never been, and I am not now, privy to the names of requesters.
Thank you.