Great.
Colleagues, if it's okay with you and I have nobody else on the list, may I ask a few questions. Is that okay?
First of all, I want to thank the witnesses for coming today and providing what I deem to be excellent testimony in regard to this particular issue.
I do have one concern about the technical aspect of it. I think the notions and the commentary are all laudable. I really do. I think it's absolutely fantastic, and I'm hoping that this committee will have an opportunity to invite you folks back again as we review legislation line by line that deals with this. I'm not sure where that's going to go, but that's my hope.
I have a few concerns which may be technical. Mr. Holman started off by saying that moving from a 20-year to a five-year window of keeping things confident, and the cultural change of having the default setting being open information, and having very restrictive exclusions on why government shouldn't release the information, is a complete flip from how it's currently implemented. I would agree with that assessment.
Mr. Wudrick, you're very concerned on behalf of taxpayers. Making sure that the tax dollars are followed and that you have, as your organization puts it, the ability to fulfill your mandate to follow the money and make sure that it's spent in the most accountable way to taxpayers, is laudable to be sure. But there might be times, and I'll give you some examples, where too much information, or information being released at the wrong time, might not be beneficial. It might not be beneficial to taxpayers. It might not be beneficial to Canadians.
I'll give you a couple of examples and then I would like all of your feedback. If our colleagues in Newfoundland and Labrador, in their role as commissioner, could give us any examples of where the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador found itself in this situation, that would be helpful as well. I'm going to talk about negotiations.
Every once in a while the Government of Canada engages in negotiations. The negotiations might be with other countries in the form of trade agreements. The negotiations might be with public sector unions when it comes to wages and collective bargaining agreements. It might be in negotiations with companies around the world when it comes to procurement of large military contracts and so on.
Given the fact that we want to shine a light on these things, is there the potential risk to make things...because I would argue procurements take abysmally long. I would suggest that sometimes these trade negotiations take a long time as well, and even the union negotiations or contract negotiations can sometimes take a long time.
If we were to take your recommendations and put them into a policy and into action, in your opinion, would we be getting a better or a worse result on those fronts?