Evidence of meeting #43 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was report.
A recording is available from Parliament.
February 10th, 2011 / 11:50 a.m.
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
It's not.... It's too close to the actual situation to be a hypothetical.
Liberal
Scott Andrews Liberal Avalon, NL
Your investigation into the lobbying-related activities of Rahim Jaffer is almost 10 months old. We appreciate that this is a long process, but this seems like a long period of time. When can we expect that report to be tabled for Parliament?
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
As I said at my December 14 appearance, in that particular situation I have officially opened an investigation because I believe it's sufficiently in the public interest. But no matter what my findings are in that case, I will table a report to both houses of Parliament--
Liberal
Scott Andrews Liberal Avalon, NL
You said earlier that you were going to table the reports by the end of the fiscal year. Is this one of them?
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
I'm not going to state what I will be tabling, but stay tuned.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
And you are quite a ways from what our study is today, so I caution you to try to bring it back to where we are.
Liberal
Scott Andrews Liberal Avalon, NL
Okay.
Well, the chair of the finance committee sent a letter to this committee on January 31 indicating that Ms. Block, without permission, had sent a copy of the draft report on pre-budget consultations. Are you at present investigating the activity of the lobbyists who received that report?
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
We're talking about the financial report.... I indicated during my opening remarks that I'm looking into the situation of the five lobbyists.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
Very good.
Does anyone have any other one-offs? If not, we will excuse our witnesses with our thanks.
You did a good job today. Thank you for coming and sharing with us. I feel better. I understand a little more about what you do, and when you can talk about it specifically, I'll be anxious to read the report.
Ms. Shepherd, this committee also has been asked to look for ways of securing documents. I recognize that it's outside the scope of your responsibility, but as you run into this and research this, if at the end of the day you also find other methods for us to be able to keep secret documents secret, I'd love it if you would also share that with this committee.
Commissioner of Lobbying, Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying
If I find something that could be helpful, I would be pleased to.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
Thank you for coming today.
We will suspend for a couple of minutes while we get our other witnesses in.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
I'll call the meeting back to order, please. We have our second group of helpers here today.
Madam O'Brien, it's always great to have you here.
Monsieur Bard, it's always great to have you too.
As you know, we're here studying the order of reference on the breach of privilege on the leaked confidential document.
We're hoping, Monsieur Bard, that you can help us today with perhaps some methods to prevent this from happening again--some remedies, if you will.
I don't know if either of you has an opening statement or if you'd like to just get to questions of witnesses.
Audrey O'Brien Clerk of the House of Commons, House of Commons
I just have a few brief comments to make and then we can get straight into questions, if that's okay.
Conservative
Clerk of the House of Commons, House of Commons
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
We're very pleased to be here today to be able to answer the questions of the committee relating to this very important issue. I don't have an actual formal opening statement, but I simply do want to emphasize that the environment that we are working in, from the point of view of technology, is basically a business application environment. Virtually the primary competence of an MP is communication and so everything we do is to facilitate that rather than just sort of have a kind of lockdown. So that's an important consideration.
When last we appeared before you, the CIO, Louis Bard, was explaining that there are really three components when you look at this kind of situation. There's the technology. There are the actual procedures around the technology. And then there are the people. As I say, the technology we have is a business application environment, so it's not the kind of thing that is set up for encryption and “top secret” and so forth and so on, but we do have procedures within this environment that I think adequately respond to the need for confidentiality and for great care in dealing with sensitive documents.
The difficulty that we run into, and Monsieur Bard made that point
when we appeared before the committee the last time is that some people are not concerned about established procedures. If a cover page clearly says "confidential" and someone chooses to pay no attention to that warning and not be concerned about the confidentiality of the document in question, we are really in a bind.
We saw with the WikiLeaks, on a far larger scale and in a quite different sort of situation, the fact that people get around even the most sophisticated of technologies and of procedures. So the whole question of people is very important, and Louis is going to be in a position to answer, I think, the questions you have about certain characteristics of the way we do the documents that would assist committees.
I think one of the basic things we're hoping will come out of this discussion with the committee is that we would recommend that each committee, once it gets to the point of looking at drafting a report, take the time to step back and have a reflection on what the risks are if the report is leaked. This will differ from one study to another. There are certain things that are highly sensitive. There are others where, for instance, in the study of a bill, all of the sessions have been public as the witnesses have been heard and whatnot, so the report still technically is confidential until it's presented in the House, potentially, but at the same time, people are quite well aware of how the discussion is going.
In something like pre-budget consultations, where there is this level of sensitivity, then there might be some use for the committee to stand back. I'm not suggesting that they didn't do that adequately; they were faced with a different sort of situation. But if they stood back and looked at how much security or how many features of security they wanted to embed in the report that would nonetheless still meet their needs in terms of the facility of getting to the report and so forth, then we think that would be enormously helpful.
It's more a question of raising awareness, but we are still vulnerable to people's decision not to be concerned, as I said, about the intention of the committees they are dealing with.
That completes what I had to say. We are available to answer questions.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Joe Preston
Thank you.
I did not share with you before we started that we're trying to finish up the portion that you're in today about 15 minutes before the top of the hour so that the committee can have some committee business time before that. So we're not throwing you out early, if it looks like that at the end.
Clerk of the House of Commons, House of Commons
I'll hold my tongue. You know how I can ramble on.
Liberal
Scott Andrews Liberal Avalon, NL
My questions are for Mr. Bard.
With regard to the issue of PINs that are commonly known on BlackBerrys here on the Hill, quite often these PIN messages between individuals are off the grid. They're off the record. They can't be traced. Is that a fact? Have you done any investigation on how to address that so that these communications can be tracked?
Louis Bard Chief Information Officer, House of Commons
You're absolutely correct. They are not tracked. There is no log of those. There's just enough when you do a PIN to PIN...there will be a short record, just enough to send it to the person who will receive the messages. But with all those messages, it's not a secure way of communicating. It's totally unsecure. You're totally avoiding the network, the environment, and the security features. Really, I would not encourage members to use PIN to PIN for very, very confidential or important types of business. It's not a proper vehicle for conducting your business if you don't want that to be on the open air. It's a very, very unsecure environment.