Certainly, they would be competing themes—there's no question about that. I would go back to our view of what access to information is, which is to provide access to information held by public bodies in order to allow citizens to participate more fully in their democracy. I would say that this trumps almost everything else.
It's difficult to give public officials the authority to say that, on the balance of probabilities, maybe they shouldn't be releasing certain information, even though the public really does have a right to know. That's why I said initially that the public interest is a stream that runs through the legislation that we proposed and that was accepted. I would think that the more you erode that, the more you erode public confidence in what a modern access to information law should be.
Sadly, I think Canadian laws, until we were asked to do this job in Newfoundland and Labrador, lived in the dark ages. They truly did. They were put in place in the early 1980s, and nothing has been done since. The circumstances that gave rise to the review of the act in Newfoundland and Labrador, two years before, was in response to a political situation that had developed. I think that it's frankly time that Canadians have modern access to information laws that put the citizen at the forefront of what the law should be about, rather than protecting officials and governments.