Thank you, Chair.
In the course of what I was saying, as part of the committee's work on the PrescribeIT scandal, it does have the power to order witnesses to appear. It can't order the appearance of members of Parliament or government ministers. Only the House, as a whole, can do that, but committees can order the appearance of other individuals before it to answer questions.
I've been part of processes at other committees—processes involving IT procurement issues—in which witnesses have been ordered to appear. I've also seen cases in which orders have been made for the production of documents, the documents haven't been handed over, various excuses have been used and then that has been escalated. The head of the Public Health Agency of Canada was summoned to the bar to be admonished by the Speaker in a process that came out of the Canada-China committee. That resulted, initially, not so much from a failure to hand over documents but rather from a brazen refusal to answer direct questions from members of Parliament. I had asked him for some information.
The point is that the people at Canada Health Infoway, I'm sure, have some familiarity with how these events have unfolded in the past, yet they're continuing with this brazen decision not to hand over documents. To use the excuse that they are worried about the secure transmission of files is quite rich.
I've been on committees in the past in which.... Committees generally exercise these responsibilities in very thoughtful and judicious ways. There have been times when committees have ordered documents of a sensitive nature, and they've put a series of parameters around how those documents are viewed and distributed. The normal thing is that committee documents are distributed by email to everyone on the committee's distribution list, but it is certainly within the powers of the committee to say, “Okay, we have some sensitivity here in these documents, so—