Thanks.
I just wanted some clarification here. I'm not an expert—even after being here for nine years—on the definition of privilege and things like that. I would assume, as I think you were outlining at the start in your comments.... I think one of the main questions here is this: Do we think CBSA is delaying this on purpose, gumming up the works because it doesn't want to answer and because there are damning things that it's hiding? That's the spin that some around this table might want to put on this. Is it simply an issue of translation getting requests like this, not just from this committee but also from others perhaps, that is putting them behind schedule? Is CBSA doing this on purpose, or was it just wildly optimistic when it promised us documents in two weeks or a month or whatever it was?
There was an assumption, which I just heard from Mr. Savard-Tremblay, that this is a government agency, so perhaps you would think that translation wouldn't be needed and that it was already done. I'd like to find out if these contracts with Deloitte were only in English. What are we looking at here?
I just have one question on the motion. It says in the third paragraph, “adopted a unanimous motion indicating that the CBSA had not received the requested documents”. Is the CBSA waiting for something? Is it waiting for those documents from translation? What is it waiting for? Is it its problem, or is it somebody else's delay?
I have all of these questions before I can make up my mind whether this is a question of privilege and whether someone is actually thwarting our efforts to get at the answers, which I think are important. I would agree with Mr. Sidhu. I have one staff member here; we're not going to look at 30,000 pages of documents. I would be happy if other people around the table did, but that's their issue.
Again, to me, it's a question of whether we believe that someone is deliberately trying to hide something here. I haven't seen any evidence of that so far. There's a slow co-operation being shown here. You might want to read reluctance into that. I don't know. I'd be happy to prioritize things so that we could read these on a timely basis as they come in and could see what they say.
Those are my comments.