Government Operations committee  Again, the successive governments have had the same point of view on this, which is that there are exceptions that must be applied and have been consistently applied for several governments in a row.

Government Operations committee  There's a separation, clearly, between the different branches of government.

Government Operations committee  I respect the role of Parliament, and I absolutely respect its authority. I must, at the same time, respect the legal opinions that have been provided by the Department of Justice and the time-honoured traditions that have gone on between successive governments in terms of how to approach parliamentary document production.

Government Operations committee  There's no political involvement.

Government Operations committee  I think in each case, we would consult with the Department of Justice when it comes to making a decision to override, for example, personal information. There are situations where personal information is released because it's in the public's interest to do so. When it comes to cabinet confidence, I think it's a much broader discussion and involves other consultations.

Government Operations committee  It would be the same under both. For cabinet confidences, I believe the Prime Minister needs to approve that, but I would have to check that.

Government Operations committee  I can't speak for every department, but I would say in general and certainly at PCO, we have dedicated experts doing these types of redactions. They're the same folks who do access to information requests, and this is what they do. They have no vested interest in one document versus another.

Government Operations committee  I do not have an estimate of the cost. I think each individual department may or may not have that, depending on how they track their translation costs, which would be one of the major costs. Obviously, we do not always track the work of each individual employee against different projects.

Government Operations committee  I can only speak for PCO. It has not negatively impacted our services to Canadians. What any of these requests does is take away resources that could be working on things like access to information for Canadians to access other types of documents, because so many of the same people work on it.

Government Operations committee  For PCO, it would not be a significant impact. We are talking about one contract and 280 pages, plus or minus. It would certainly work. We had to do translation and we had to do the redactions, but as I mentioned, there are not many redactions. I can't claim that this has been a huge burden on us.

Government Operations committee  The passage I read, previously, from “Open and Accountable Government”, was from the previous government. The exact same wording was continued for the current government. Again, as I've said from the beginning, this is not something unique to today. It's something successive governments have absolutely enforced.

Government Operations committee  My understanding would be that, in that time period, the exact same processes we're following today would have been followed in terms of the types of redactions, whether it be—

Government Operations committee  The answer is no.

Government Operations committee  The redactions we based on commercially sensitive information. It's not the complete contract. It's sections. I can only speak for our department. We redacted banking information related to McKinsey and the signatories of the contract. That was the extent of what we redacted.

Government Operations committee  The Prime Minister.