Just quickly, Chair, I know we have some newer members here, and I want to give people the benefit of the doubt. There is a difference between ordering the production of documents to a committee and ordering documents to be released immediately.
Years ago, on the Afghan detainees issue, for example, I know the approach taken by other parties when the Conservatives were in government was to order the production of documents for immediate release, and that was contentious under the circumstances. We are not proposing that in this motion. We are proposing that the committee order the production of documents so the committee can look at those documents, and then the committee can make decisions. What the Liberals proposed with their previous amendment was to order the production of documents but allow the government unfettered discretion to redact those documents. If that were to happen, we would likely be getting blank pages from the government, as has happened in the past.
What we are saying is that the committee should be able to look at the documents and the committee should have discretion in its review of the documents, but that's not the same as publicly releasing all the information in them. That allows the committee to exercise responsible discretion once it has those documents. The committee can exercise that discretion, which is different from the government exercising that discretion to prevent the committee from seeing this.
I know there have been cases in the past at this committee where we have ordered and received full unredacted contracts, and the committee has approached it very judiciously in terms of what to do with those contracts, once received. I think some Liberal members are confusing this issue of ordering the documents versus the public release of the documents, and I think it's important to be very clear on that.
What we are proposing now, which I hope will allow us to move to some consensus or at least reveal the true intentions of members, is a subamendment that replaces the existing amendment language with the following: “and that the departments and agencies tasked with the document production suggest redactions in writing along with the unredacted documents; and that the committee review the suggested redactions in conjunction with the parliamentary law clerk”.