Thank you, Chair.
When we ended, we were talking about the purpose of the tools provided to us by parliamentary tradition and ethics legislation. Of course, the ultimate purpose of them is to protect the public interest, ensure the integrity of decision-making and allow government to attract people with diverse backgrounds. We talked a bit about the components within each of those. I won't go back to that point.
We need to talk about the costs—the cost of production orders and the cost of regular reporting.
I encourage colleagues to do a thought exercise. I think we can all agree that daily reporting would not make sense. Of course it wouldn't. That's because of the pressures it would put on the system. Those are inherently obvious when you simply think about the costs involved. Because people don't see the activity behind the scenes, they may not always appreciate what it means to the public service to have to do these things.
Let's start by agreeing that not all production orders—all the time, in perpetuity—are in the public interest. We can have a more constructive approach than that. We can have a more thoughtful approach than that. I've heard many speakers talk as though all production orders are unalloyed goods. It's very easy to speak in those absolute terms, as though any kind of frequency is good frequency: “Let's just do them perpetually. Let's just have this hamster wheel of production orders.”
The challenge is that overly broad production orders from parliamentary committees create real tensions that work against the public interest. Committees need meaningful powers to obtain evidence in order to hold governments to account, but when those powers are exercised too broadly—without clear scope, relevance limits, privacy safeguards or proportionality—you damage other public goods that Parliament is also meant to protect.
I really want to underline that. This is the core public interest challenge we all have to deal with in a thoughtful fashion. It's not inherently one thing or the other. We need to exercise judgment as to when to use these powers in the right way.
There are many public interest challenges that production orders can bring, which I want to put on the table—not all of which will apply here. However, it's important context as we assess Mr. Barrett's arguments about the intrinsic value of acts like this.
One challenge is the privacy right of individuals. I won't belabour that, because it's not much at play here. Even if names are later redacted, disclosure risks embarrassment, reputational harm and deterrence from interacting candidly with government. When you talk about providing a report that has people's names in it, there will be people who do not want to have their names, in an ongoing fashion, presented in that fashion.
That ties closely to the second point: Production orders can chill honest, internal advice. Government depends on candid internal discussion. In public service circles, we talk about fearless advice and faithful execution. I'm sure you've heard those words before, or variants of those words.
Officials need to be able to test weak ideas and weak assertions about whether or not something is, for example, a conflict of interest, run it through the entire process and get to a conclusion before they are required to report to a committee. If they don't have that ability, people will worry. It will be caught midway through the stream of work and cause challenges and disagreements, frankly, before a decision is made. If every kind of draft thought ended up as a speculative note that then became something the committee, on the 15th of each month, dealt with, officials would write less candidly. They would avoid discussing these things.
I want to return to this point. I want to underline it. It is important that you think about the behaviour you're incentivizing within the public service when you start saying that on the 15th of every month, you want to hear exactly every thought that has been in someone's head about this, absent any of the context that would be provided by the process playing out in full.
We can talk about some of the other challenges, which I think we would all agree on—my colleagues across the way would agree too—but we need to consider this when we think about the benefit of transparency to national security, public safety and the public interest. Records can contain all sorts of things. When we release them on an ongoing, drumbeat basis, we are not allowing some of these processes—which often take many weeks even to get into context—to play out. You have to think about that as well.
This leads to harms to commercial confidence and economic interest. Government is routinely talking to people about economic activity. In fact, I'm quite sure this is the pith of many of the concerns that have been voiced, however you feel about their legitimacy, regarding this bid. Do you really want to encourage people to not work through government processes and not talk to government about things that might be of benefit?
They talk about bids, procurement pricing, trade secrets, market-sensitive plans and investment negotiations. We all know the very act of meeting can be a signal to capital and a signal to competitors of that capital. If it gets out in the middle of a process rather than at the end when a decision is made, you are potentially damaging commercial interests. If you are damaging commercial interests and driving people away from conversations with the government, you have to ask yourself whether you're acting in the public interest.
It can also undermine cabinet confidentiality and collective decision-making. I won't dwell on that. I think we can all appreciate that there are limits on that front.
One that is very important—and it's one I know well—is that it can create paralysis through administrative burden. Large-scale ongoing production orders require thousands of hours of work to locate records, review relevance, identify privileges, redact personal data, prepare translations into English or otherwise, brief counsel, and manage secure transfer. This diverts scarce resources from public capacity. As I mentioned, one of the scarcest resources we have, and certainly the one that is the highest cost, is our most senior officials, as we're talking about in these particular moments.
When we are talking about those privacy considerations and whether it is always in the best interest to put something into the public interest, we also need to think about selective or misleading use of raw documents. Documents without context can be misunderstood. One of my challenges with the way this order is written is that it demands documents in a certain format: drafts, incomplete chains and shorthand notes. These informal exchanges can be presented as definitive evidence when they are not.
I think about an experience in my own career. I was at the Government of Alberta, and a colleague of mine, probably three levels down the managerial chain, was speculating as to what the motives were of the former premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney, for a particular action, as speculated in emails. That individual didn't know, but that became part of a paper document that was presented in a raw format. That raw format then was used to suggest that Premier Kenney was doing something untoward that he simply was not. It was speculation.