Thanks very much.
You mentioned to my colleague Mr. Long that one of the most important changes is the threshold. You've hit that over the head a number of times. To be fair, when the previous government introduced this bill, we had John Davies before us, and he said that in 2004 the Auditor General examined how departments and agencies worked together to investigate counter-threats, and then again in a follow-up report in 2009 the AG found that departments and agencies were not sharing intelligence information because of concerns over violating provisions of the Privacy Act or the charter, whether this concern was valid or not.
You and Professors Forcese and Roach, who were before us, proposed a necessity threshold as well. We had the departmental officials before us and they said, hang on a second, that would be problematic for us because the disclosing institutions, 100 or so agencies, don't have the expertise to determine necessity. Therefore, we want to make it easier for them to get the information out the door while keeping in mind that the recipient institutions must stick within their mandate.
If we're looking at amendments and trying to balance the concerns of the department, would a possible amendment be that disclosing institutions disclose relevant information, but recipient institutions are subject to a necessity standard? Would that help both sides to find a compromise there?