Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good afternoon, members of the committee. I'm here today with Richard Denis, deputy law clerk, and Mark Watters, chief financial officer, in response to the committee's request for a technical briefing with respect to the Board of Internal Economy's recent decision on certain large-volume mailings.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Mr. Lamoureux, I think I'm going to answer by saying the following. The Speaker has explained to the committee why he's here. I'm here to support him, and I think that the purpose of our presence here today is to support the Speaker in discussing the estimates. That's my answer.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Mr. Chairman, if you agree, we can have our staff talk to the committee analysts and share thoughts and convey some ideas to the committee in that way.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  For instance, a list should be established of all the documentation held by a department, an auditor general or another officer of Parliament that could be requested by someone for consultation. We are talking about a fairly limited number of documents. Among them are emails, briefs and draft submissions.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I would also add that witnesses greatly benefit from parliamentary privilege when they appear before the committee and deal with it. That's a very important element.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I have a slight variation on that description in the following way. Really the argument was over what constitutes a proceeding in Parliament. I think the view they took was that the emails were not part of a proceeding in Parliament. Is that accurate, Richard, or not quite?

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Actually, since the act does not apply to either the House or the Senate, the fundamental criteria of parliamentary privilege continue to apply to all the proceedings of the House and its committees. So the status quo has been maintained. However, as Richard said, as far as requests by other parties go, the House co-operates with departments as much as possible, especially when it comes to House administration, as that administration is not subject to parliamentary privilege in the same way.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Correct.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  As I said earlier, Ms. Latendresse, the staff of the Committees Directorate and Richard's team can help you do that work. They are readily available to you. This is not always easy to do, but we think it's possible to develop criteria and categorize documents.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  In terms of other jurisdictions, there are variations in what I would call Westminster-style parliaments. The regimes in each of the countries that you consider—United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand—all vary. In the United Kingdom the House of Commons is subject to access to information legislation.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'll just say, in fact, that's why this committee a few years ago did the revised Speaker's permission. It's to keep up with trends.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  As I said earlier, there is no requirement for unanimous consent. It can be done by majority decision of the House. Obviously, that involves more use of House time.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Certainly, I can try and answer the question. I would start by saying, though, that it isn't only for times when the House is not sitting. It really would help at any time, when faced with these kinds of requests. I think the trick is to develop criteria and perhaps categorize the types of documents in the possession of committees and of witnesses that could be considered okay to release via a third party request versus those that a committee would not want to release.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Before Richard answers, at the outset I would say to the committee that both Richard's team and the Committees Directorate management team are at the disposal of the committee to work with your researchers to flesh some of that out. They're absolutely at your disposal to do that.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  To our knowledge, yes.