Hopefully I can. I had my hand up to speak anyway, so I think it's timely.
Primarily, when you look at the witnesses, we've already asked for several of them and we're asking for them again. There seems to be some confusion about the issue of providing the firearms list to the political level. From emails, that appears to have happened through the minister's chief of staff, so there's a question as to where that direction came from. Even some Liberal members have raised that issue in questions today when asking about where the request for this information was coming from. We know from the email stream that it was provided to the minister's chief of staff, and from the text of that we also know that it appears to be a response to a request.
Second, we have had various testimonies, both here and at the Mass Casualty Commission, about the role of SIRT, what SIRT said and the rules for SIRT in providing information to civilians, at the Mass Casualty Commission and again here today. Those who were provided it on the 23rd were not members of the RCMP, and that seems to be contrary to the SIRT's request, so it's important to have a clear understanding of that process and whether or not rules were breached.
As well, Mr. Brien has been mentioned in the Mass Casualty Commission testimony by various people as intervening on things like the messaging around how many victims there were, so he was involved in the communications decision-making process. Obviously, he has some background in his life before that, which leads to his connections with the government at the political level.
Ms. Bayers was also mentioned during the Mass Casualty Commission as asking whether or not on the 28th they were going to release the information, so she was clearly contacted by someone suggesting that this should be done. We need to get to the bottom of those issues.
There's still a lot of mystery, in my mind, as to where the request came from to send this information outside the RCMP. I know it wasn't released publicly, as some people have said, but in essence, when you're releasing it to civilian people such as the chief of staff, the minister and the government officials who were listed on Commissioner Lucki's email of April 23, it's clear that the release was beyond the limits of what SIRT said. We need to delve into and understand why those requests were made, who made them, when they made them and why they were requesting to go around the normal police procedure in this terrible incident.
I think there's a lot of clarity we still need to get from these witnesses, and that's why I put them forward.
Thank you.