Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate MP Masse's desire to try to find a way to the crux of the issue, which I think he captured well, in addition to the specifics about the legal text. I am very concerned about what I believe to be—I'm assuming unintentional—misleading testimony by the minister at this committee. If we had just accepted it, it would have made it difficult for any of the witnesses who come. I think MP Masse makes a good point about every witness who comes here, particularly ministers of the Crown when it comes to their own legislation, because it changes the total tenor of what witnesses may or may not say about a bill that is outdated. I won't go over that again.
I certainly would like to get to the bottom of this issue, which would be driven by a discussion here in the committee with the deputy minister. This is essentially item (b), which would allow us to try to figure out.... I think there is a fundamental parliamentary principle we have to go by here.
We don't want to delay this, because we only have another half-hour left.
I would support what MP Masse suggests in the sentence—by the way, I think it's part 1, not section 1, just to be clear—in order to get to the crux of the issue, which is to ensure that the Privacy Commissioner.... I think we have the Privacy Commissioner on Thursday, and he won't have access to these if we wait until Friday, so I think we need to talk about when the Privacy Commissioner comes. We can do that separately off-line from here. I think the Privacy Commissioner should be able to comment on the amendments that are about the Privacy Commissioner and the powers of the Privacy Commissioner's office.
I understand that government members have suggested that we will probably have these amendments perhaps in the next few days anyway—the three, not the eight—so I think it would be great to have the Privacy Commissioner come and have a session with the officials on Thursday, but I'll leave that to the committee, Chair.
I would like to reserve as an element—not in this motion and not for now—that I think we need to have some sort of more formal discussion at some time in the future with the deputy minister to understand how we got into this situation with such a large parliamentary element at stake. I will leave that for another day.
We're trying to achieve a bunch of things in this and get to the root of that issue. Ultimately, what we're trying to do is make sure that the witnesses who are going to speak over the next number of meetings on privacy have a knowledgeable way to do that with the legal wording. If the government is able to ensure that we can get that by the end of the week, in the next few days, I think all will be well and we can get on with the study. I would hope our Bloc colleague would see the value of supporting that.
Thank you.