Unfortunately, the law as drafted in Canada and the U.K. and Australia—they have almost the same wording—has left it to the court to decide what is journalism and what is programming, and in the U.K. what is art and what is literature. This hasn't been done yet.
But as a reasonable person, any number of us here would see a document and say this is clearly something to do with journalism—a report, sources, whatever—and that ought to be protected. The Supreme Court says it should be. And whether you're with CTV or Sun Media or CBC, it has to be protected. I have no argument there.
Some of it, such as programming, may be more problematic to decide—certainly what is artistic is something else again—but in the final analysis, these will be areas of dispute. Not every one of the requests for which CBC calls for an exemption will come under section 68.1; some of them will fall into a grey zone. And the grey zone I refer to is the case in which it's information of a hybrid nature: some of it is protected, some is not.
You need to have an independent and objective somebody to make that decision. The court has agreed that the Information Commissioner is that person. Parliament has decided that this is the person too. The Information Commissioner can look at a complaint by a requester, look at the record, and then issue a recommendation—not an order to disclose, but a recommendation—either to disclose or not disclose.
If that were to happen, we wouldn't be here.