You remember? Well, it's hard to forget.
And I do recall, and that's why I want to be careful here. There was a lot of media attention, a lot of documents coming and going. I certainly could see a situation if someone wanted to point out to me where I made comments in the media about something that had been technically tabled with the committee but that the committee hadn't yet become seized of it and done anything, and yet I was making comments on it.
Now, I think we can make some guidelines that differentiate, because where there's the potential for matters that should be kept confidential.... Remember, we went out of our way to bring in both the law clerk and the Privacy Commissioner so that we would at least try to avoid making mistakes. So that exercise is not something we've done, and maybe we need to talk about that in the future, that there are categories of information, and once we slap a certain category on it, for instance, from that moment forward, all members are embargoed from commenting publicly until the meeting convenes. Something like that.
But many, many times, as Madame Faille has pointed out, the documentation is already out there somewhere and we're just getting copies of it. And if somebody wanted to get it online somewhere, they could have got it long before we did. So why would we go out of our way to make every single document we get a matter of confidence, and the media call up on something that's already out there? They know the whole story, and we have to do this silly little “sorry, I can't comment”, which really at that point would be a fig leaf on the truth. It's just a silly thing to have there.
Therefore, my wrap-up--I know that was kind of long, but for me it wasn't that long--is that I think Madame Faille is again correct in suggesting that the quicker we get this resolved and move on, the better.
Chair, I'll just throw this out for consideration. At steering committee let's have a talk about this, discuss things we think need further discussion, and then begin that discussion or recommend back to the committee that we do that. I think there are a number of lessons we can learn here. But I have to say at this point to Mr. Saxton, given that he didn't ask for any remedy but merely for comments, he has those. I think he has our attention. I think he's raised some legitimate issues that need to be addressed.
At this point I'm not convinced there's really anything here—and it's a very strong step—based on which we would take a step to admonish the chair for actions we didn't approve of. I don't think we're anywhere near that, and I don't see anything to that extent. But I do hope that we pick this up at steering committee. Even after all these years, I'm seeing yet another area in which we can improve the way we do our deliberations.
Thank you, Chair.