Mr. Chair, in every access to information act, there is a statement of the public's right to know. Then there are exceptions to that rule that should be narrow, and then there is an independent umpire who decides whether the records should be disclosed if the government doesn't want to disclose them. This next set of amendments, in particular, NDP-8 to start, is about that exemption. The commissioner has said over and over again, as have other witnesses...and in many statutes across the land, they have what are called harms tests. Rather than simply a category of information that can be withheld whether there's a harm or not, the objective in my amendment is to add a phrase that would say the “disclosure of the information would be injurious to” a particular interest.
Now I realize that the threshold question for you, Mr. Chair, is whether or not these amendments, as the others I've proposed, are within scope. I, of course, will respect your ruling on this, but I will point out that this is consistent with what for 20-some years has been suggested by committees like this, that there be changes to these exemptions. This is how you swallow the rule of openness: you just have to make the exemptions broad enough that everything gets withheld. This is an effort to do what many commissioners have sought and what most legislation across the land does, which is provide a harms test, rather than simply a black hole into which the government can pour whatever it doesn't want disclosed.