I'm very sincere; I hope you recognize that. The point I'm making, Mr. Chair, is that this is completely relevant. When you make a recommendation to Elections Canada, and when we propose laws, we don't want them specific to a single instance. We want them to have broad, general application. As a lawyer, I can tell you that individual cases always make bad law. You want to look at the breadth of possibilities that could be considered. I think if this committee is going to take this role seriously, we have to do that.
We're not just talking about hypotheticals. The fact is that any one of these individuals could win their local election. Their party could win enough seats to form a government. According to your ruling, Mr. Chair, as an individual they would need to be eligible for cabinet, they would need to pass all security screens, and they would need to have their future prime minister appoint them to cabinet. All of those are hypotheticals, but they're incorporated into the ruling you made, so, yes, it is relevant. At the end of the day, we want recommendations that will allow this committee to make a difference beyond the present.
All members here know that starting last November--and I'm about to move a subamendment, Mr. Chair--I was the one who initiated this interest in review of the Privacy Act. I'm not going to go into the details--we've had the discussion before--but suffice it to say that I and others, including Mr. Hubbard, were convinced that a study of the Privacy Act was long overdue.
We began this study after the Mulroney-Schreiber hearings wrapped up. I believe we're very close to completing our study at this point. I had hoped we could have used our meeting today, Thursday, and the two meetings next--