The committee has to weigh how important that is in a situation where we are talking about deliberately misleading. It is a serious offence. It's a hanging offence. It's a capital offence, and we reserve capital punishment--when we had it, anyway--for serious offences, and there was a very long and elaborate process for determining whether in fact the offence was committed.
I can only say to the committee that for your own sake and for the integrity of the parliamentary system, at the end of the day the readers of your report should be as convinced as you are from the evidence you have that in fact this was a serious misleading of the House in this “not” issue and not an incidental failing of a kind that might be forgivable. I'm not making a comment. I'm just raising the question for you.
However, when you get to the other issue about whether the funding was decided by the officials or decided at the political level, yes, there was that period of time when the minister arguably could have corrected the error made by the parliamentary secretary and that error was not corrected until the parliamentary secretary apologized and acknowledged his error. Even there the minister never did say the officials were overruled. Some of you might think that should have been what the minister did, to indicate that this was a decision made at the political level and not a decision based on recommendations from the officials.
How important is that? That's your call. That is for you to decide. All these months went by and no clarification was offered. How many of the debates of the House were led off in the wrong direction because you didn't have the full information in front of you? Those are the kinds of questions, it seems to me, you ought to be asking yourselves, not the mere, incidental fact that there was a period to give the whole truth, but there was a period to give the whole truth on an important matter, a matter that was important to the House and this committee, and our proceedings were denied an opportunity to consider the matter fully because the minister was not fully truthful. You have to weigh that sense of gravity, I think.