Mr. Speaker, many constitutional and civil rights experts who have looked at the ministerial directives we drafted a year ago and at the provisions in this bill, which take the essence of those ministerial directives and would give them the force of law through orders in council as a result of Bill C-59, have said that those directive are the most progressive they have ever seen. Plus, they are public for the first time in Canadian history. We have moved this along light years from where it was.
Let me just put a hypothetical situation to the hon. member. Imagine that there was a would-be bomber in a little town in rural Ontario who was going to get on a train to go to a big urban centre to detonate a bomb, and presume that information about that threat came to the attention of the RCMP and there was a question as to the source of that information, but the information was accurate and was viable. What would members do in those circumstances? Would they let the bomber get on the train to go to a large urban centre to kill thousands of people, or would they put in the law, as we have done, the exception that when the use of the information is necessary to save Canadian lives, they can in fact save those lives?