Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I agree with the substance of the motion. However, its wording may mislead us as to the intent of our colleague. I would not want it to allow the committee to circumvent the Official Languages Act or to compromise the ability to obtain documents in both official languages.
According to the motion, "should the law clerk have copies of any of these documents," they should be translated and produced as soon as possible. "If the law clerk does not have such documents," we will have to ask the government to produce them and give us access to them, but nowhere is there any mention of translating them. This could be interpreted as a roundabout way of getting around the obligation to translate them. To avoid this, I would like this obligation to be clarified in both cases: if the law clerk has these documents, he will have to have them translated quickly and give us access to them; if the law clerk does not have these documents, the government will have to table them, have them translated and give us access to them.
The motion is interesting in that the secrecy of industry information will not be an issue, because it says that we will review these documents in camera.
That said, Mr. Barlow would need to clarify his intention. If his motion is that the committee be given access to documents in English only to examine them in camera, I will oppose it unless he decides to make an amendment. I can also propose one, but I would like to hear his response first.