I move that all the words after “(Auditor General's Report 9 and 10);” be deleted and replaced with the following:
That the committee clerk write to each of the suppliers signalling the willingness of committee members to sign non-disclosure agreements in order to review unredacted copies of the contracts, and, should the suppliers decline, the suppliers would be required to provide a written explanation to the committee as to nature of the information being withheld and the reasons for withholding it from members of Parliament; and if, after 30 days, the committee has not received a response, or the committee is not satisfied with the responses, members sign non-disclosure agreements in order to review unredacted copies of the contracts. In either case, these contracts would be provided by PSPC in a predetermined Government of Canada secure location and PSPC officials be made available to respond to committee members' questions regarding the documents. Documents would be provided to members of Parliament only and on the condition that the documents not leave the location and all of the rules of the secure location are followed.
Furthermore, the committee requests that PSPC officials be available for future in camera meetings to discuss the topic.
The French version follows, and I believe you also have a copy.
Basically, this tries to set a stage where we have an obligation to let the suppliers know. If they have objections, the committee can still sign the NDA in any case. Hopefully, they won't have objections and it will happen faster than 30 days. If they have objections, the committee can say, after 30 days, “We're going ahead, signing the NDAs and looking at the documents.”
We want to make sure we don't draw liability to the Government of Canada for any unnecessary reason, even though I understand that parliamentarians have a right to see them without signing NDAs. Given that the intention is to keep these documents confidential, I don't think signing NDAs should be problematic. It avoids the government's being in breach and having potential liability in this case.
I would point my colleagues to the committee related to Afghanistan, where a confidentiality undertaking was signed by members of that committee before accessing documents.
I hope members see this as a reasonable approach. We're saying, “You should definitely see the unredacted documents.” It's my very strong belief that you should, but do it in a way that doesn't create unnecessary liability, and do it in a secure location.
I will stop at that, Mr. Chair. I don't need to belabour it. I'm happy to answer questions afterwards, if I come back on the speakers list.