Chair, I'll just bring forward a friendly amendment.
Just for the information of members, it doesn't all originate from electronic copies. Some of these are photocopies. That's specifically what brings me to my friendly amendment, which I hope will be a friendly amendment. Following the wording “November 9, 2009, a copy of all documents”, the amendment would add “while respecting all applicable provisions outlined in the Privacy Act...”.
Simply put, we recommend to the minister that yes, everything come to this committee, with the exception of that information on those documents that should be whited out, such as the small-town mayors' phone numbers. In some cases, they actually have put in their own home phone numbers. They were told that this information would be kept in confidence.
There's also the other provision as it relates to confidential commercial information that may have been included in those documents. These are applications that include a lot of private information, including signatures, names, and addresses--those types of things that really are of no interest to us as a committee. It's outlined within the Privacy Act that this information should not be distributed.
So I just make that amendment there because actually the budget officer receives all of the information with it intact, but I think that once it comes to our committee we can't be assured of the same type of confidentiality just because it's distributed to all our offices and our office staff see all of that.