Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you also, Mr. Chair, for opening up what I think has been a very useful line of questioning. In fact, I think your questioning was an absolute bombshell here.
I learned something, perhaps the most useful thing so far in this meeting. Under the Treasury Board guidelines, personal information--which includes personal identity, perhaps the most personal information associated with an applicant--could properly get into the hands of the minister. In other words, the authority for ensuring compliance and administering the access to information regime is with the head of a department, but the delegation of authority flows both ways. Ultimately, the person who is responsible is the minister. Therefore, we've just opened the door and may have found the root of the problem.
If there are people reading these Treasury Board guidelines, to say that it's okay for the minister to find out.... And you'd have to be a Pollyanna to think that if one minister knows, the rest of cabinet or at least the PMO doesn't know. Their first loyalty and obligation are to the government they serve.
This is horrifying, frankly. Now I see how the scope and scale of this thing could be epidemic and consist of more than just isolated incidents, if anybody is interpreting it the way we've just seen it.