Order. This is meeting number five of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. Our orders of the day are committee business. There are two items before us.
Based on the steering committee report and the acceptance of the full committee, we had scheduled that we would discuss the project of proactive disclosure under access to information, and as you know, we also have a motion from Mr. Easter that we will also consider at this meeting.
We are not in camera right now, and I'm open, but I can tell you we should all be aware that when our researchers work for us and present us with very excellent comprehensive documents to assist us in understanding the work we are proposing to do, they are not to be treated as witnesses. They cannot give opinions, etc. If you want to have those kinds of discussions, we must go in camera, because in their role they cannot be guiding the committee and suggesting various things. They will certainly take our requests for additional information, etc., so please keep that in mind as we move through this.
You have received two documents from them. One was “Recent Developments in Pro-Active Disclosure-Canada”, and a second, “Recent Developments in Pro-Active Disclosure--the United States and Other Countries”.
Having had an opportunity to review these, I think all the members will agree there's no question, this is the way governance is going. It's apparent we have activity in that regard in Canada, and certainly there are other countries that are ahead of us, but it is a very complicated area. There are a lot of dimensions, there are a lot of pieces to it, so I think at this point I would like to entertain from members their thoughts on the scope. We're trying to figure out where we go next. Let's put some parameters around the scope of the work we're doing, the kinds of witnesses members would like to see, the issues we would like to address. We certainly would like to consider what kind of interaction we would have with other jurisdictions, whether it be travel, conference, teleconferencing, or having witnesses come here. These are the kinds of things we should get members' input on so we start to define an approach for stage one, say, of our consideration of this subject matter. During the break week, our researchers can put some flesh to those bones and come back to us with the kinds of things we may be able to do, and assist in the scheduling based on availability or time required to put certain things in place.
So why don't we start with some members' input. We'll start with Madame Freeman, s'il vous plaît.