Madame Legault, can you take us through a request here? There's a little bit of uncertainty or lack of clarity to this whole issue.
Some individual citizen, whether it's QMI or whatever, makes a request. I think most Canadians would agree that if it involves confidential sources in the construction industry, that would not be something that really should or would involve your office. But let's say in a hypothetical situation that the requester wanted the expense claims for a certain manager within CBC for the month of February, and CBC responded and said “No, that's programming, creative production, a journalistic thing, and we're not going to do that”. You don't have power to order.... They just fold their hands and say “No, we're not going to do that”, and then they say “We're going to go to court”. Is that what happens here?
This is not rocket science. We as parliamentarians would like to see a very simplified version, whether it requires a legislative amendment or not. Don't forget, when you're in court the taxpayer is paying both sides of this situation, and I don't assume for a minute it's cheap. Why can't we adjudicate? If it's legitimate journalistic programming and creative, we as parliamentarians would like to have it adjudicated very quickly. There might have to be an appeal mechanism, but not to drag it on so you're dealing with situations from 2007. If it's legitimate—let's say the sources on a media thing--to me that would be a journalistic issue.
Can you clarify this issue and explain just what you see the problem to be?