Mr. Speaker, I will try to be shorter than the two minutes.
The independent oversight is clearly after the fact, and it is time parliamentarians accepted their responsibility.
This legislation that is now a private member's bill was tabled by the government of the day in 2004-05. It was tabled by the then public security minister. There was a recognition on the part of that public security minister that there indeed has to be parliamentary oversight.
The current Minister of Justice sat on that committee, as did you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Whatever happened to that Minister of Justice? Why did he get fearful of doing the right thing in terms of ensuring that we have proper oversight of these intelligence-gathering agencies?
The parliamentary secretary can talk, but there were a lot of questions not answered at that Senate committee yesterday or at a parliamentary committee, because we cannot talk about classified information. However, if we had a group of parliamentarians who swear the oath and have the responsibility to check out these things, we can in fact do that.
Maybe the parliamentary secretary can answer this in his remarks when he gets up. Can he tell us the details of why the metadata was collected on Canadians going through Canadian airports? Were there any MPs involved, in terms of their data being collected?
These are some of the questions we need answered, and we need to absolutely ensure the privacy of Canadians. The way to do that is to set up an oversight committee with responsibilities.