Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I can understand why the motion's been put forward, but there are a couple of things I'm thinking of. First of all, public accounts is doing work on this. I had to fill in last week on that. It's almost as though we have a two-headed monster right now with regard to dealing with it. It's taking a lot of resources. I'm wondering whether it would be more appropriate for this to be there at the public accounts committee now, since from what I saw at the meeting I was at, they're actually delving into it quite substantially, more than we are here. That happened before when some of this was at, I think, the ethics committee. I'm sorry if my memory is hazy on this, but we've been going around this issue for a while.
Something I'm really worried about is the companies and their information that could go public. They didn't realize they had a process in place when they made applications, and I think a good point that was made here is that the SDTC problem wasn't from the companies applying to it but with the behaviour of the director and particular members of the board.
Why wouldn't we then just have this as the policy forever if that is the case? Some of the companies that have been captured in this have already expressed concern about their intellectual property and other matters and their competition from other, even foreign, companies on some of these innovations that are taking place. That's what has come back to me in the office as well.
I have a lot of concerns related to that. In the past when we've had these sensitive information requests, we've even taken the position that we would have the documents behind closed doors, so to speak, in camera, so we could look at them. I don't know if that's a path we would consider so we wouldn't actually victimize somebody by accident. We've done that for the auto sector in particular. It's not the best solution, but it's one of the potential solutions.
The difference, though, in this one is that we have so many other different files here. For all those reasons, I have concerns with the motion as it's presented right now. I don't know fully what happened at public accounts today, but I'm going to have to go back and take a look at where they're going with this. I think that's a bigger question for all of us.
I know there have been other issues that have been shopped around several committees. The auto file, much to my concern, was also shopped around different committees. These are all the things I'm thinking about on this.
In particular, I've been contacted by some companies that have expressed concern that they're being maligned because of the behaviour of SDTC's board members. That also affects the investment they put into it, as well as the investment the government and taxpayers put into it, because people see them as toxic for no reason of their own making.
I'm wondering, for anybody else at the table here, if you made an application for a bank loan or something, and then all of a sudden later on, retroactively, all your personal and company information was then made public, how you'd deal with that. I'm not sure why we wouldn't be more strategic or tactical on this.
Those are the concerns I have at the moment with regard to the motion.