Hypothetically. Mr. Chairman, I want to be helpful. Please don't get me wrong. I'm prepared to take the approach you're suggesting, although it does not seem that we're now talking about the Access to Information Act request and how we dealt with these particular requests we're discussing.
By and large, what happens in the process is that this information comes into the department. It will come, usually, to the director level or below, and it usually comes in the form of telegrams or e-mails and classified and non-classified material. So we collect this information, and at some point someone makes a judgment call that this is worth telling their boss about, and that might be the director general. Then that person will look at it and say they think this is sensitive enough that it needs to go farther up the line.
So it can either be a specific piece of information or it could be something that rolls into a broader analytical piece that they're doing in terms of developing a policy toward a particular country or an issue, and so on.
All along the line judgment calls are made that determine how a piece of information is going to be used. Sometimes it ends up on my desk and doesn't go any further, because I say the minister doesn't need to know this. Sometimes it comes to my desk, and I say they're to do another note to the minister. Sometimes I don't get it at all. An ADM might say it doesn't have to go any further.
That's how the system works. Is it a perfect system? As I said before, no system is perfect. We try to make sure we make the right judgments here and there and everywhere, but sometimes we don't.