I think Mr. Cullen has already made the point that there are limits on what the minister can do. It would not be him. It's really the second part of it--that the government appoint the correctional investigator to play that traditional role.
I realize we are crossing jurisdictional mandates here. It could just as easily be a retired judge or somebody else of that status, or perhaps the ombudsman in Ontario. I don't really much care who it is. It's just that the correctional investigator is the most logical one in these circumstances.
To answer your question more directly about opening that discussion for a resolution, there are other people who have been acting as intervenors. They may be able to act as brokers, so some of them may be people with whom we should be discussing this.
The real problem we have is that the head of the agency, who should be taking on the process Mr. MacKenzie is speaking about, has almost washed his hands of it. Complaints go in, and there's no response to them other than them being denied. It's in that kind of discussion we're talking about that something meaningful has to go on.
If you were a convicted murderer you would get greater access to your families than these three men. They haven't even had access to their families in six or seven years, and two of them have children. It's that kind of thing that we need some attention paid to.
Let me just say this to Mr. Norlock. Over my career there have been a number of times when I've had to deal with people who felt so compelled to act, including sacrificing their own health by going on hunger strikes. He is very right that every time we confront that we have to ask whether we should be responding to this.
It's not just these three individuals who I care about. I hardly know them, but I care about Canada's reputation. We have to do more in responding to these circumstances. They haven't been charged. They don't know the evidence against them. They're not getting any kind of meaningful legal representation, and what legal representation they've had is cut off from knowing what they're charged with. In circumstances like that, I think the state's responsibility is to bend over backwards to respond to this kind of conduct on their part.