I'd like to thank Dr. Powlowski for those comments.
There's one thing that's important to remember. I don't think we have to wait to see in September how the department is going to react, because we already have an example of how they reacted.
Again, the law clerk of the House of Commons took the unusual step of writing to the clerk of our committee when he received the documents pursuant to our first request back in February. I think it's really important for committee members to think about this.
I'm going to quote from his letter again. It said here:
Upon reception of the documents on March 15, 2020, you provided them to my Office so that we could make the necessary redactions to protect the privacy of Canadian citizens, permanent residents and public servants as contemplated by the production order. However, as mentioned above, the documents had already been redacted by the respective departments.
Even though there was an order to the department to provide the documents to the law clerk and to let the law clerk do the redactions, and to redact them only according to the three criteria we had given them, the department took it upon themselves to do the redactions and to redact according to ATIP, when that was clearly in violation of the production order of this committee.
Moreover, in terms of Dr. Powlowski's thought that maybe we can see how they do and then respond, this is what the law clerk said to us in the same letter:
As my Office has not been given the opportunity to see the unredacted information, we are not able to confirm or adopt those redactions.
Once you get page after page that are blacked out, there is no way to determine how wisely or responsibly those redactions were applied.
Those would be my responses to the claim to just see how the department does and we'll be able to hold them accountable. No, we won't. This committee has one job right now, and that is that we have to determine what the criteria are that we're going to give to the department in terms of the documents we seek. I think it's completely responsible for us to say, “Send those documents to the law clerk and have the law clerk redact according to specific criteria.”
If Liberal members of this committee think that those three criteria are not broad enough, then the amendment should be to add some more, so maybe add federal-provincial relations or whatever you want, but by simply adopting the ATIP criteria, all 13 of them holus-bolus, nobody can look anybody in the eye at this meeting and say, “Whoa, let's wait and see. I'm sure we'll get fulsome information from the department in September. They'll give us everything we want to know about this.”
Anybody who is seriously advocating that right now is not paying attention to the evidence that we have before us of how they responded when we asked for the documentation in February and March.