They do. It goes to the next step.
Again, my bill only addresses the right and privilege of parliamentarians to apply for a secret security clearance. They're valid concerns. Once a committee has decided, it's no different if it were PROC that said, “Here's a potential study for this committee.” Maybe it's more for BOIE, and it would be, “All right, should a committee have all their members appropriately cleared, and should Parliament decide, going forward, that the next step is we need to be doing more studies of a more classified nature, how do you address the resources?”
The point I want to get to is that when I was in the military, my last job before I went to Iraq was handling joint training for the whole Canadian Armed Forces. I put together a consequent management exercise working with the government ops centre in public safety. There were 47 different government departments and agencies involved in that, which imagined an improvised nuclear device having gone off in Peggy's Cove and how we would deal with that. Again, it was not a DND lead or a CAF lead, but we know it's the force of last resort.
One the huge challenges we identified, and this is all unclassified, was the lack of infrastructure and even the lack of government people with the appropriate clearance right across this country at the other levels of government. How many people in a hospital have a secret level clearance or access to secret level information? If a terrorist threat were coming down the pipe and you wanted to be prepared to deal with the consequences of it, where would that happen?
I could go on forever about the challenges and some of the necessary infrastructure and investment that needs to be put into the ability to share classified information, but, again, that's a step past my bill.