There are other provisions in the Access to Information Act that protect information, obviously. There is protection for commercially sensitive information, for instance. There is protection for personal information, which a source would be; it would protect his own personal information. It's a mandatory exemption.
In terms of other discretionary injury-based exemptions in the act, there are others. For instance, section 15 deals with national security. It probably deals with some of the most sensitive information we review under the legislation, and that's an exemption that is discretionary and that is subject to an injury test. That has been in existence for 30 years, and that has worked extremely well. As far as I know, there has not been any leak of highly sensitive security information from my office.
What we do in those cases, though—and this is something I'm perfectly prepared to do in our investigations with the CBC—is to go on site to consult on the most sensitive information. We don't take the documents to our office. We basically go in and we look at the documents ourselves, just to assure ourselves that it is actually information that deserves protection.
We could very easily do the same thing with journalistic sources, if the CBC felt more comfortable, in that we would basically go there and not take the documents out, and just satisfy ourselves that the exemption was properly applied.
So no, it's not novel in the act, that kind of exemption. It exists. It has functioned very well. Institutions function very well. In fact, I would say that if you look at the guidelines of the CBC, that's really what they're proposing to do.
Our experience so far with the CBC investigations is that it's essentially what we are seeing in the application of the specific complaints. So the CBC is maximizing disclosure through our investigations right now, applying a similar exemption, even though they're actually covered by an exclusion.