Thank you. That's helpful.
The role of the chair sometimes is to see if we can find some consensus among the committee. You know that the last time I actually left the chair and spoke I expressed some concern about the relationship this committee has with the ministers who come before us. That's extremely important, because if you're going to be in an adversarial relationship, the prospect of getting any collaboration on legislative amendments is diminished. That's a problem. I know every now and then we like to exercise our muscles and maybe fire off a missile or two.
But there are two points, and I want to see whether the members want to comment on them.
First of all, this committee does not have the timeframe in terms of its workload—we get two meetings per week, with all the breaks, etc.—to do a look-see at either access or privacy, in its totality, with all the stakeholders. It would take some time, a very long time. The committee took a decision a long time ago that it wasn't practical for us to try to do the entire act, and the Privacy Commissioner had agreed and had come back to us saying that there were some things that might help the act to work a little bit better. There were some administrative-related issues, how you could streamline or make sure the administrative side was working reasonably well, and a couple of legislative things, which were consequential to some substantial amendments that were made to the PIPEDA act. There's no question that some of those were in an attempt to conform the principles under the PIPEDA with the Privacy Act itself. I don't know whether or not the committee is still of the view that we can or cannot do a full review, but one thing I do know is that we don't have the authorization or the mandate to develop a piece of legislation. We need direction from the minister to propose a piece of legislation to the House. That has to be kept in mind.
With that as background about how we got to where we are right now, I don't see in the minister's response to us a response to each and every recommendation that was made, and we only supported five of the ten. It would have been nice to have his response on the specific recommendations, on whether they had merit, because that moves the yardsticks forward. We've done some work at least on some five micro things. I would have liked to have seen, and I hope the members would have liked to have seen, at least his response as to whether we're going in the right direction on this or whether there are substantive reasons for or against, etc. That's helpful. If I were in a position to make a decision, I probably would like to see us go back to the minister with a letter and ask for a response to the report, not to the whole act; we didn't do the whole act. But I'd like the courtesy of a response to the specific recommendations that we supported and any comments he might have that amplify on the other ones that we included in the report—the Privacy Commissioner's recommendations, etc.
Maybe I've spurred a little interest in further discussion. I have four people on the list. We'll hear from them and then see where we are.
Mr. Dechert.