Just on the last point here, Mr. Chairman, the history of swearing-in of witnesses under oath, the committees branch gave me a brief memo. It would appear that the history largely has been a debate about whether a committee needs the permission of the House to administer an oath or can do it without that permission. Much of that history is sort of passé, because it is the case, and I think it is generally recognized—I think Marleau and Montpetit's text affirms this—that if a committee wants to administer an oath or affirmation to a witness, it may do so. I'm troubled by that, and let me explain that practice.
The first time I remember it arising--whether or not it was happening with any frequency--was before the government operations committee, which at the time was looking into the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, and at which the veracity of some testimony was very much in question. There was talk about whether there might be a charge of perjury laid against some witnesses. So then the view developed that if you're going to lay a criminal charge of perjury, you have to have, on record, the administration of an oath, so that it's quite clear that the individual was well aware that they were legally obliged to tell the truth. Subsequently, this practice would creep up in the later proceedings of the public accounts committee pertaining to the sponsorship program, and on other occasions: if there is a sense that we may be dealing with some doubtful testimony here, if we want to prosecute for perjury later, we should get them to swear an oath.
In my view, I don't think the option of going for a prosecution for perjury is a very realistic one. However much one might want to bang the drums loudly about it, I don't think it's frankly a very realistic one, first of all because it's very difficult to successfully prosecute for perjury. It's not as easy as a bank robbery might be. It's very hard to know what the truth is in a given situation, and whether the individual knew that what he or she was saying was not the truth, and whether he or she intended to convey that untruth. These are hard things to establish legally in a criminal court. So I don't think it's a very fruitful avenue for the committees to look at, and I've said this to committees before.
What's more fruitful, perhaps, and more appropriate is for committees to defend themselves against false testimony and for committees to call upon witnesses to explain their testimony, and for committees, acting perhaps as judge and jury, to form a conclusion as to whether they were or were not misled or lied to by a witness, and to make a recommendation to the House that action be taken and so on, and to go that route, for which you don't need an oath, in my view. Now, if the House turned around and made the rule that yes, you do need an oath, if you're ever going to go to them with a complaint of being lied to, well then okay, you're going to have to. But I doubt that the House would make such a rule.
I don't look fondly on the idea of using oaths, frankly, but the practice has emerged, in my view, for that reason from time to time. One could argue that it could be an affront to the witness sometimes, who is here perhaps not in a challenging situation, to talk about some public program or policy program or whatever, and all of a sudden is confronted with an oath as if they're being told that they can't be trusted to tell the truth so we have to require them to swear an oath. The optics might be problematic as well and set things off to a bad start between a committee and a witness.
That, I think, in short—not in short, in too long, perhaps—responds to your points.