Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I wonder if you could help me a bit with the root purpose of the legislation. We're told that this is already reflecting practices that the ministry is undertaking. Is that correct? In part, is this codifying what's already underway?
The second part of my question is that I'm hearing from other ministries that there's a lot of duplication and some confusion about the whole matter of security clearances. Who makes them? By what standard are they done? How many times do different agencies that deal with the government have to do them? It's to the point where private organizations--businesses, for example, and infrastructure--aren't interested in doing business with the government any more because it takes too much of their time. They can't qualify people in one place to be able to do business and carry on.
Surely if the heart of this legislation is to codify some of the practices that you have, are you addressing the question of what a security clearance is and how to make sure that it is not going to be an encumbrance? This is a particular issue when we're leading up to performance-sensitive events like 2010 and so on. Is that issue addressed in here, and where? Could you comment more generally on the problem, if you think it exists?