Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm certainly not opposed; quite the opposite. I would be supportive of Mr. Erskine-Smith's amendments on the one hand, but we're not there yet. I don't want to get too ahead of myself, but there is one for which we will have a proposal for a subamendment, and we'll get to that.
I would echo Mr. Clement, in that I appreciate the effort at compromise, but it's hard for me.... It's not in terms of any particular member, but in looking at the government's vision for this bill, it's hard for me to imagine that anyone listening to the testimony we heard, with quotes like those of Kent Roach, who was saying that “full access to information” is one of several “critical criteria for success”.... For me, when we hear things like that, it's difficult to fathom that the government wouldn't recognize their importance.
Some of the stuff we've debated today might seem cosmetic, such as the election of a chair and things like that. It's very inside baseball to folks, some of that procedural stuff. I don't want to diminish the importance of those points, because we certainly still consider them essential, but access to information is what this is all about.
Unfortunately, I wasn't here at the last meeting, when we heard from the Information Commissioner, but I did read her testimony. Reading between the lines of what she was saying, I could see she was basically asking this question rhetorically: how can the committee be expected to accomplish its objectives without this full access? To think that as a parliamentarian, whether it's me or another colleague around the table sitting on that committee, we would have less access than other review bodies, I would pose the question that you would have to ask yourself: what the heck is the point?
That said, if we can take a smaller step in the right direction, I certainly won't be opposed to it, but I think it bears saying on the record that this is the heart of what's wrong with this bill. Certainly it bears mentioning today, and it won't be the last time that we mention it.