On a point of order, I'm rather surprised at the turn of events since our last meeting. It was agreed by the committee, as a way to follow through on this, that the committee members who wished to meet with the Judge Advocate General over the period between the last meeting and this one—not the one on Monday—would get together and consult, to see whether we could come up with something that met the concerns that were raised.
That hasn't happened, to my knowledge. I don't know who else would have been consulted, but I certainly wasn't. I have seen some documents that were put on my desk in the House today. Thank you for giving them to me, but that was at two o'clock this afternoon. I obviously haven't had an opportunity to study these seven or eight pages of documents, including, apparently, some questions that other members of the committee had with respect to those options, which seem to have answers as well.
Obviously some consultation has been going on, but it hasn't been with my involvement, and some dialogue has been going on, but it hasn't been with my involvement. I don't know about Mr. Bachand. He can speak for himself.
We can certainly hear from the JAG today, but with regard to coming to some conclusion this afternoon without having an opportunity to study this further.... It was a serious matter that was raised, and we had a useful discussion the last time. But clearly, if we're talking about something of this importance and there appears to be some interest in coming up with something that's acceptable, we really should have and need to have an opportunity to look at these things in detail. There are lists of offences that have been added that might be available in options 1 or 2. There are complex interrelations between the National Defence Act and the Criminal Code on various matters.
I'm not very happy to find that these ten days have passed and no consultation with us or dialogue has taken place and I find myself given a very complex document at the start of question period, which is not the best time to be studying legal documents and trying to figure out what they actually mean.
If your purpose, Mr. Hawn, is to allow for discussion of this here today, I don't see any new amendments or anything else before us and I'm not in a position to adequately address amendments today based on any of these options.
I'm happy to discuss them and consider what they might be, but if Laurie is talking about getting this to the Senate, I don't know how that's going to happen, unless he has some special parliamentary procedure that I'm not aware of whereby it goes directly from the defence committee to the Senate.
So this is a bit of an ambitious agenda, I suggest, Mr. Chairman. I would welcome other people's comments, but I haven't had an opportunity to study the implications of these options and have any dialogue with the JAG on them.
