No, Mr. Speaker, it is not.
In the first place, at the time when I was sworn in I had not yet consulted either with the deputy or the solicitor general with respect to the information in my proper role. Second, a police investigation is not the responsibility of the attorney general and the Minister of Justice.
If the hon. member will look at the roles and responsibilities of officers of the government, he will see the RCMP conducts investigations on its own. It is the solicitor general, not the attorney general, who reports to Parliament for the police.
These are not simply matters of detail. They are fundamental issues, as I said in response to a question last week from the hon. member's colleague. Police investigations are run by the police, not by politicians.
It is only those who choose not to see it who say there is no distinction between an attorney general acting responsibly in communicating to the RCMP information so it can pursue it and exercise its own judgment about its importance and an attorney general saying to the police: "I will have no role in a police investigation. That is up to you to decide". Those are the principles.