Thank you, Chair.
I want to go back to my testimony a little bit and to the history behind how I came up with this bill in the first place. It's very relevant to my concerns around the amendment and the subamendment, which is really discussing how we put in the proper safeguards around classified information.
I looked at this. I think I said this in my testimony. When I first conceived of this idea, I was thinking that I was going to make it mandatory for every MP—I couldn't handle senators—to get a security clearance. If they fail it, it should be publicized in the news, etc. As I dug into that with the appropriate people to help draft the legislation, I quickly ran into the issue of parliamentary privilege and issues that I recognized would actually interfere in the democratic rights of Canadians to some extent or to run for office.
As I dug more into it, I quickly realized that I can't solve this. I can't do justice to it in a private member's bill where I am limited to a couple of hours of debate, if it gets through and we get it to committee, get some testimony on it, get some experts forward and then properly get it to ground on a suitable solution to tackle the whole ambit of how it potentially interferes or not in parliamentary privilege, etc. I talked to different parliamentarians across different parties. I understood that there's actually a wide divergence of opinion on what the best way to do this is and what Parliament's and parliamentarians' rights are, so I said that I can't do that.
What can I do? I can fix an obvious stumbling block that I've seen under two different consecutive federal governments. They've run into situations where ad hoc committees had to be put together and people had to get a security clearance, and it took umpteen months or sometimes years for people to be approved. It could have been that people who were originally going to sit on some of these committees maybe were not suitable to get a clearance, and then these parties had to put forward new names to get clearance. It takes forever, which ultimately degrades the public's trust in our democratic institutions and processes. As well, we've had committees—you can look historically at the defence committee and other committees—where we've had witnesses testifying and saying that they can't tell us something because we don't have a security clearance.
How could I fix this? I thought about it and I said that the first step I can actually put in place is to allow a parliamentarian—an MP or a senator—to have the right to apply. That's it. I realized I can likely solve it with unanimous consent from all members. I thought they'd recognize that as parliamentarians they should have the right to apply for a security clearance. That's it. That's the whole purpose of the bill and that's all the bill states, that parliamentarians have the right to apply for a secret security clearance.
The intent behind it was never to get into and potentially handcuff, hinder or debate how the government of the day protects classified information—in this case, secret information, because my bill only deals with the secret level. Those steps and processes already exist. This amendment and the subamendment talk about putting safeguards in place that the government already has the ability to and does put in place.
Let's build on that. Let's look at some examples.
Mr. Jorgensen, I'll put you in the hot seat first. In your past experience, I know you were directly involved with the ad hoc committee on the Winnipeg lab. How long did it take to get all the members who ended up looking at those files security-cleared?