At the risk of making it seem highly technical, it's not simply providing the document to the clerk of the committee. It would require the chair, in fact, to then present the document to the committee in a proceeding. It thereby, in my view, would acquire the protection of the parliamentary proceeding.
As I said earlier, that doesn't necessarily mean you can then take the document and walk off and get into other discussions in other places about the document, with the result that the content of the document is disclosed outside the proceeding.
Until that happens, Mr. Chairman, I don't believe.... And this is assuming the document falls within the prohibitions of the act. And this is an assumption. I haven't seen the document.
You know this, Mr. Reid, but other members of the committee may not have had the pleasure of reading sections 4 or 5 of the act. It's not a short provision. One needs to examine it very closely, with the document in hand, to see whether in fact it applies to that document, to see what the obligations are upon every individual who might himself be in possession of that document. I'm just not prepared to say at the moment what legally that obligation is without closer study of the act, with reference to the document in question.
I might point out that I have an additional problem if all I get is a redacted version. I mean, you have to picture it. If the member or any individual gets hold of a document with a lot of black spaces, well, they can only be responsible for what they can read. If what they can read does not present anything that suggests it's covered by this act, then arguably they're not at risk.
I don't know what the document reads. I need to see what the document is that was in their possession. If the document in the individual's possession is unexpurgated, unredacted, then that may present, of course, a different picture.