I appreciate that. Thank you for that clarification.
In your remarks, under legislative modernization you have a recommendation that there should be an obligation on government to consult your office on bills that will affect privacy before they are tabled in Parliament.
You are aware, of course, Commissioner, that there is already a substantive legal opinion and legislative process for the drafting of legislation. You explicitly said “government”. I would like some clarification on what part of the process, whereby a bill already goes through the legislation drafting process and goes through checks for constitutionality and all of these other types of checks, your office would fit in with.
I would also like clarification as to whether, when you say government, you actually mean members of Parliament as well, because not all legislation that's tabled in the House of Commons is tabled by government. Every member of Parliament who is not a member of the executive has the right to table private member's legislation. We have the resources of Parliament, but we don't necessarily have the resources of government to do some of these things and we are sometimes under very stringent timelines to get our legislation tabled before Parliament. This would be a layer added on that would lengthen that process in certain instances.
Could you give me some clarification on that? I just want to protect the rights of parliamentarians, making sure that they can table legislation.