Okay, just to make sure that I don't jump the gun, I think that in camera discussion is a very high-value opportunity. I mean, if you look at public governance boards—I sit on two of them for the Province of Ontario, for instance—certain matters are required to be discussed in public, in particular, matters related to finance, matters of confidence, maybe matters of public discourse and any sort of money bills and the like. However, much of what parliamentary committees do, I think, ultimately could benefit from a more informed conversation, also by parliamentarians, to understand how government works and why civil servants make the decisions that they do.
My experience is that civil servants will be rather reticent in public with comments that could possibly be construed as critical of the government of the day—and so they should be in order to maintain neutrality and objectivity. I think this measure would allow committees to get a better picture.
I don't see this as a broad opportunity for parliamentarians to get access. I also think that it's a bit obfuscating the matter when we necessarily talk here about classified top secret information. I mean, a lot of what we're talking about is simply the opportunity to have access in many cases to documents that government would protect for any number of reasons, as government does in the course of practice, and to have a franker discussion.
In practice, I simply see this as an opportunity to empower Parliament. I also think the conversation about NSICOP obfuscates the matter, in the sense that we all know that NSICOP is a committee of parliamentarians; it is not a parliamentary committee. Rather, what this bill would allow is, I would say, to re-emancipate parliamentary committees, given that the ability of committees and Parliament in general of holding the government to account—not just with this government, as this is a longer tradition in Canada—has atrophied. Everybody's familiar with the centralization of power in the Prime Minister's Office. NSICOP effectively does the same thing because it reports to the executive, and so this re-establishes some balance with Parliament.