Public Safety committee  I'm happy to do that. There's an exchange of correspondence between Mr. Cromwell and Ms. Ward on exactly that. I'm happy to share those letters with the committee so that it's clear for everybody. The commission suggested that we provide a list of the Government of Canada numbers for documents containing additional pages, and that if there's future disclosure of the additional pages contemplated in the letter, we identify them using those numbers.

Public Safety committee  Yes. Handwritten notes do take longer to review because they have to be reviewed in person and they can't be machine-read. Most of the other documents we get electronically, so we have a system that reads them and codes them. That obviously has an impact on the speed with which we can get documents to the commission.

Public Safety committee  I'm the deputy minister to the Minister of Justice. We have the same relationship that any deputy minister has to a minister of the Crown. I provide the minister with information and with briefing notes to make decisions. If I ever thought that there was some political interference in a matter where there shouldn't be, I would raise it with the minister and have a discussion with him.

Public Safety committee  There's no buzzer or anything like that, or specific guardrails. We have to look at that in our department, because the minister is accountable not just for the Department of Justice but also for other agencies, including the public prosecution service, where there's clear legislative independence.

Public Safety committee  As I said earlier, I have three reasons to believe that. One, because we didn't know what this report was, our advice was not to raise it unless the commission raised it. That was the extent of our advice in terms of being reactive, or not proactively talking about this. Remember, this was July 5, and he was only appearing on July 27, so our view was that we would have time to get the report, look at it, determine its relevance and figure out whether it could or couldn't be....

Public Safety committee  You'd have to ask Superintendent Leather. I don't know what he was thinking. All I know is what he told the committee on the 25th.

Public Safety committee  We gather documents from seven departments and agencies and we review them for relevance. If they're relevant, they are produced, unless parts of them, or all of them, have to be retained for privilege based on the Canada Evidence Act or other legal privileges. How can they be assured?

Public Safety committee  I'm reassuring you that every document that we are provided with at the department will be reviewed for relevance and if they're relevant, they will be produced. This happens on a weekly basis. In terms of information that came out at the hearings of this committee on the 25th, we learned some new things and we've tracked it down and produced....

Public Safety committee  [Technical difficulty—Editor] journal entry. Maybe Owen has had a look at this and can provide more information.

Public Safety committee  [Technical difficulty—Editor] pages of over hundreds of pages of documents, from Superintendent Campbell. Four of those 13 pages that we held back dealt with the April 28 meeting. So we didn't just hold back the four; we held back the 13. In answer to your specific question, if it's just a reference to a phone call with the commissioner, there's nothing privileged about that on the face of an entry in a document, so we wouldn't have flagged that for a review.

Public Safety committee  For the work that we're doing for the commission, we have a team of lawyers. They're led by Lori Ward, who is our most senior counsel there, so she—

Public Safety committee  Well, it could be somebody within her team, depending on how they've sorted out the responsibilities within the team, but counsel are able to make a determination after consultation about whether a document is privileged or not. This is something that all lawyers do.

Public Safety committee  She's responsible. She's leading the team that's supporting the commission, so ultimately all of the decisions that the team is making she would have some accountability for, yes.

Public Safety committee  It's a phone call to Thomas Cromwell or somebody else on the commission counsel team.

Public Safety committee  Yes, I think everybody wants to be understood, and the advice needs to be as clear as possible.