Mr. Speaker, there is not enough time to answer the question fully but I understand it.
I do not want to speculate on what the government's motivation is. However, I know, after the time I have been in this place, what the powers of committees are and the delegated authority from the House to committees. The issue has to do with those documents, without which the committee members could not possibly ask the very best questions they would be capable of if they had access to them.
The question is the accessibility of documents. I believe there are two ways to deal with it.
The first is to get the ruling from the Speaker with regard to the minister's statement in this place that he has been relying on the Canada Evidence Act to say that is why only redacted documents are going to be available to the committee. Let us assume there is a legal reason why the committee in its public forum could only get redacted documents.
Another opportunity for the committee would be to have those members of the committee who are not already privy councillors to be sworn into the Privy Council and then to meet in camera to examine the documents to satisfy themselves that the representations made by the government, that there are no torture references, et cetera, could be resolved at least for the benefit of all the committee.
We have the tools. Let us use them.