Mr. Bratina, under Bill C-22, the ultimate discretionary authority-holder is the Prime Minister, and the proposed national security and intelligence committee of parliamentarians would be beholden to the Prime Minister in certain instances with regard to the information they can access and information they can report on. Again, I think many people who commented on Bill C-22 believe that it's perhaps over-broadly written and that it could be narrowed in terms of those restrictions. But it's important to say that the essential dilemma of parliamentary scrutiny of intelligence and security revolves around secrecy, and the need to both access secrets, in order to make sense of the security and intelligence world, and to protect secrets in the interests of Canadian national security. Bill C-22 legislation tries to find a fix to that difficult dilemma.
If I can come back just for a minute to your question about retention, it's absolutely true that most information these days is digitally maintained. There are still a lot of paper records around, particularly on higher-level decisions, memoranda to cabinet, and that kind of thing. But I would disagree with my colleague Tamir about the fact that there are no retention schedules. There are plenty of retention schedules. The problem is that they are not legislated and they're not available in the public domain, but the mechanism that is used to enforce retention schedules is ministerial directives to the agencies of the security and intelligence community.
One of the things I have pressed for in various circumstances, including with regard to CSE, is that some of those ministerial directives around retention of information could be made public without endangering national security to reassure the Canadian public that information is not being kept in an abusive and overly long way. The retention mechanisms do exist; they just are, unfortunately, and perhaps in some cases necessarily, secret.