Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the openness of the minister's remarks.
The public accounts committee is dealing with the Groupaction sponsorship scandal, if we can call it that. As of today we finally agreed on a partial list of witnesses. Two of those witnesses are two members of the staff that the minister has brought here today, the deputy minister and the executive director of communications.
When being briefed by the Law Clerk of the House of Commons, one thing that came up was that sitting public sector employees may not feel comfortable being forthright in answering all questions completely openly and honestly. In fact they may in fact have a legal right in common law to not divulge everything due to the duty of loyalty to the employer.
Given that the standing committee has some power to oblige people to respond, would the minister direct those civil servant witnesses who are still employed by government, because some of our witness are in fact no longer in the civil service, to answer forthright, openly and divulge everything they know about the delivery of the Groupaction scandal when those questions come before the public accounts committee?