It just seems to me that there could be a political decision to refuse to disclose information to the security committee. If that is the wish of Parliament, then that's what will happen. In my view, that is going to undermine the work of the committee. That's my own personal view. That's why I am here testifying. Obviously, the legislators are going to decide what they want.
At the very least, if there is a decision such as this.... The difficulty is making a determination that something is injurious to national security. The experience that I have is that this is over-claimed. That's the worry. If that remains, then there should be some assessment of whether or not it is in the public interest—notwithstanding that disclosing information could be injurious to national security—to have the committee, in its oversight function of security agencies, get information in order to do its work, and that decision should be reviewable in Federal Court.
Then it becomes a question of whether the decision of the minister involved was reasonable under the circumstances. That seems like an appropriate discipline to put into a scheme like this. As I said, the Federal Court does have a lot of experience in terms of security matters. It would be a fairly simple way to amend this bill in order to provide a little more discipline and oversight in the decisions to not disclose information by the various actors here.