Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Commissioner, thank you for joining us this morning.
I will begin by putting a question to you about the letter you sent on July 8, 2021, to Mr. Duclos, who was then president of the Treasury Board, to share with him your observations following meetings with various ministers. One of the things the letter talked about is the importance of implementing a declassification program.
I will provide you with some context. I have thoroughly analyzed the history of document declassification, and I realized that documents are often overclassified—in other words, documents are classified too often. You also talked about that earlier.
According to a recent article published in Foreign Affairs magazine, in a single year in the United States, 4 million people classified 50 million documents, for a total cost of $18 billion. Of course, that is done on a smaller scale here. In conclusion, the article says that most of those documents do not contain important secrets in reality, and that they are being classified only as a precaution or to avoid accountability.
What do you think about that?