Mr. Speaker, yes, indeed, those amendments will be forthcoming. I would be pleased to share them with everyone in the House in order to ensure that those are at least starting points for a dialogue about how the bill could be improved.
I think that if we create a committee that has, in an unprecedented way, security-cleared people, in that all nine members will have top secret clearance, they will meet in separate, especially assigned rooms, and they are people sworn to eternal secrecy, and we act in good faith in that way, I think they could be trusted with the kind of information that, sadly, the bill would withhold from them.
I guess the critical point I would make to my hon. friend is that if we do not earn the trust of Canadians with the bill, we have lost an enormous opportunity. It was rightly pointed out that the House has not dealt with this. It has been 35 years since the Macdonald Commission. All of our allies have something like this. We are finally getting it on the order paper. Let us take it to the last step and get it right.
If we do not, if people think this is not a credible oversight operation, then all of the things we are trying to do to improve Bill C-51, which I certainly hope the government is going to fix in due course, and all of the scepticism Canadians have about our national security apparatus is going to be exacerbated.
If we, however, create a committee that has access to information, that has an independent chair, that is not seen to be under the thumb of any government of the day, we can create the trust that Canadians need and it can help our security service do its critically important job with that trust in mind.