Very briefly, Mr. Chair. I'm not sure if we're going to go past 10 o'clock or not, but just to get this on the record, I think we would need an indication from the parliamentary secretary, or the government anyway, of what was the intention behind the commitment to have a bill of rights. Was it to have some legal weight or was it a general statement of principles?
To split it in two, or absent of the government saying what it had intended, the committee is going to have to decide which of the two it prefers so that we can then say to the drafters.... Ultimately it comes back to Mr. Walsh's shop anyway to draft something to respond to the committee and/or the government.
If I understood Ms. Mortensen, let's say it's an amendment to some future ombudsman's act that the government is going to send back to us. Maybe it's the preamble, then, if this ombudsman act has a bill of rights section, and maybe it's the preamble, then, if I understood, that could clarify whether that bill of rights section.... There would be one “whereas”, maybe, and I'm not a lawyer, that determined or said the bill of rights was to be interpreted as a level of service, as a non-litigious—is that the right word?—level of service.
In other words, just to follow up on my colleague's question, does the term “bill of rights” have an unalterable interpretation if a veteran went to a court? Does it have an interpretation that requires that it always be legal? Then maybe the problem is the words, “bill of rights”.
Is that clear as mud?