I have a memo that was furnished to the government with respect to the current issue, presumably before the Privacy Commissioner. This is a memo, which I'll read in full. There was a matter of some controversy from Dale Eisler, assistant secretary to cabinet at the Bureau du Conseil Privé. He says that with respect to the Bronskill matter:
There was no knowledge of an ATI request by any specific reporter. We are never privy to that information. In this case, there was a discussion about ATI files that were being released on the issue of alleged CIA overflights.
It was well known that Mr. Bronskill had already written several stories on the matter, and had been calling Public Safety and other agencies for comments and clarification. In this case, the assumption was that, given his particular interest in the subject, he would be writing another story.
In retrospect, it was inappropriate that any such assumption was made.
This was a discussion only among officials. There was no involvement by political staff and the summary report of the discussion by officials was a practice that predated this government. These type of summary reports were regularly shared with members of the previous government's Prime Minister's communications office.
So here we have a top PCO official basically describing public officials speculating on a name and then including it in the routine minutes of their meeting, which was distributed to political staff as well. Do you think this is evidence of prima facie and deliberate violation of the law by political staff? Either of you can comment on this.