Thanks a lot, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank my colleague for bringing this motion forward and also for the way he has brought it forward. I think he's done it in a collegial way, which I personally really appreciate.
This is a serious matter, and the government does take it seriously. When these allegations came forward, the minister acted on them. From what I understand, we're going to have him here on Monday. It is a serious situation, and the committee asked for something....
Mr. Barrett enlightened me, when we were chatting during the break, that when you file an ATIP report, what comes back has comments as to why things are redacted. When that's not there, it's natural to assume that there was more taken out than there should be. We don't know, because all we have is a document that has some information with big blanks in it.
I don't think anybody on the committee wants to have personal information, such as people's names or phone numbers or anything that would identify the companies that were in this. I think we're all on the same page there. It's whether this document has only been redacted for that or whether there was additional information taken out of it.
My parliamentary intern—they are always particularly smart—printed out the “Access to Government Records” part of the Access to Information Act, which references “trade secrets of a third party”.
I think what we're facing right now is a department that has legal weight about what needs to be taken out and a committee that wants to have all of the information we should have to be able to look at this.
I was going to make a proposal that the committee send a strongly worded message from the chair that they review their redactions. It's not a motion yet; I just want to put the idea out there.
I see the clerk saying that she needs a motion.
The idea would be that the redactions be reviewed for their appropriateness, and for any redactions that are left in, an explanation is included with that redaction as to why. Whether it's personal information or corporate business information, they should also review whether they are appropriate. We would give them 24 hours to do that and get it back to us.
The only issue is that we have the minister coming on Monday. If we got that on Thursday by close of day and it's not satisfactory to members, I don't know what recourse we have to ensure that we have something for Monday.
I just wanted to put an idea out there to try to come to a compromise, because I think we all want the same thing with this.