Thank you, Chair, and thank you, Carole, for the opportunity of bringing this forward.
I guess we would want to be certain that the motion says what we really want it to achieve. So I don't understand why we need to reaffirm the need to maintain the independence of the Office of the Information Commissioner. I'm not clear why we would preface a motion like this with a comment like that. I don't think the independence of the Office of the Information Commissioner has been threatened or challenged in any way, certainly not in this Parliament.
The idea that we should have a draft bill to work on here rather than a discussion paper, which has been tabled, is something that I share. I think our time would be much better spent if we had draft legislation and we were working with a meaningful working document rather than spinning our wheels once again and revisiting this whole immense subject of access to information legislation.
John Reid did table a very helpful package last fall that was set out as draft legislation. Clause by clause, he would have in there, “Here's what we seek to achieve, here's the change that would be necessary in the bill, and here's the actual language.”
Page by page, it would be very easy to collate that into a draft piece of legislation, and that's what I think our starting point should be. So I would vote in favour of this motion, subject to clarification of what we mean by the opening sentence.