Thank you for the question.

As Senator Lankin pointed out, the committee's not entitled to receive cabinet confidences, but it's also not prohibited from receiving them. The particular issue the committee pointed out in some of its previous work is not so much that the committee believes its work has been compromised or hindered by not being able to receive cabinet confidences; it's really two pronged.

First, departments aren't obliged to identify that they're not providing documents or relevant documents that are subject to cabinet confidence, so the committee doesn't know what it doesn't know. If there's a document or information subject to cabinet confidence, the committee doesn't necessarily know the document exists, because it doesn't need to be provided.

The act doesn't say you have to identify when you're not providing something; the committee is simply not entitled to receive that information. It's not necessarily that the committee has looked at things and identified that this is an obvious thing we're missing and that we need to go back to get that. It's more that it's useful to know what exists so that the committee can gauge the extent of information it may not be receiving or information it should be receiving.

Also what we have noticed, largely as a result of inadvertently getting information subject to cabinet confidence that is later identified as being cabinet confidence information, is that in those instances, we have been able to discern that the application of the definition was sometimes very broad. As I'm sure you all know, the legislative definition in the Canada Evidence Act is quite broad and can be taken to quite an extreme.

The question is, which cabinet confidences are in need of protection from the committee? Are they all? Is there a category of cabinet confidence the committee should be receiving? To be able to really dig into that question, it would be useful to know what the committee is currently not getting and to perhaps issue some sort of guidance or clarify the definition in terms of the government documents that need to be provided.