Mr. Speaker, my colleague too has rapidly earned a reputation as being a champion of the issue of accountability and transparency. I look to him for many years of exposing on behalf of Canadians everything that is wrong about this place.
To answer his question briefly, I can only restate that one cannot overstate what a central place freedom of information holds in our society. The Supreme Court of Canada calls access to information quasi-constitutional. It is one of those fundamental rights and freedoms that a free western society enjoys. We apparently do not appreciate what we have because we have let it go lax. We have let it slide to the point where one can no longer honestly say that Canadians enjoy the right to know and the right to access to information, because the evidence would speak otherwise.