Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think that my colleague Mr. Housefather's questions are highly appropriate. There does indeed seem to be a cassette that mixes everything up.
I'm surprised. I thought you had practised law. But there is confusion here between industrial and commercial confidentiality. Commercial competition is never an exception to the Access to Information Act, but we haven't even got there yet. We are not about to release any information. We want to do our work as parliamentarians and limit the confidential information to the committee members here today.
Several of my colleagues spoke earlier about the committee's compliance with confidentiality. It happens all the time. Canada's Parliament can compel the release of documents. This was done recently with McKinsey & Company, but it has frequently been done before.
My colleague asked whether commercial contracts should be treated more confidentially than secret and confidential information about Afghanistan held by the Department of National Defence. No one is above the law. No one is above Canada's Parliament. The Standing Committee on Public Accounts has the right to require documents like these.
Now we're taking it even farther, and raising questions about secrecy. Mr. Tada, you gave a short description of what can be found in the contracts. There is the price, the quantity, the location and availability. None of these has anything to do with intellectual property or trade secrecy.
As a reminder of what trade secrecy is, I'm going to quote from Justice Phelan's decision in Merck Frosst Canada Ltd. v. Canada (Health):
The type of information which could potentially fall into this class includes the chemical composition of a product and the manufacturing processes used.
I am not a lawyer, but from the world of business. And yet, I've never seen a commercial contract that included a product's chemical composition or manufacturing process.
There's a misunderstanding that really needs to be clarified. I would very much like to end this meeting with all of us on the same wavelength, and using the same definitions, which have, after all, been established in law for quite some time now.