In the interest of full disclosure, Professor Roach and I are doing a doubleheader today. We're up in front of the standing committee on Bill C-22. Those thoughts are in the can, so to speak.
I would say that Bill C-22 provides a necessary remedy: that is, investing parliamentarians, for the first time in Canadian history, in a national security review function. That said, I would echo the concerns about the scope of information disclosure. It's not just that the government can, in certain circumstances, decline to provide information; there are actually mandatory exclusions, which are actually quite unusual as compared to our Five Eyes partners.
In the U.K. the exclusions of information are discretionary, and there's a protocol that the executive branch and the parliamentary committee have negotiated that says that those exclusions will only be used in the rarest of circumstances. In other words, they won't exercise their discretion to deny information.
In our system there's a whole cadre of information that will be ultimately excluded automatically. I would add that among the information that will automatically be denied the Bill C-22 committee are ongoing law enforcement investigations. It sounds sensible, except when you consider that the RCMP currently still has an ongoing investigation into Air India.