Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Perhaps I should have asked this one under general comments, but it has to do with the Information and Privacy Commissioner. I just want to ask one question about this. Mr. Chairman, I had a chance to review the private Members' bill Mr. Gargan tabled which was defeated in July 1991. I notice it was only 11 pages long. This bill we're dealing with is 44 pages long. I understand that the reason the bill before the House is so much longer is that Mr. Gargan's bill had government departments responsible for giving out information rather than this Information and Privacy Commissioner.
I'd just like to ask the Minister, Mr. Chairman...This Information and Privacy Commissioner and the bureaucracy have annual costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Do we really need them? Couldn't you just require, as Mr. Gargan's bill did, each government department, by law, to be forced to give out this information and go to the courts to force it if they don't? I would just like to know, couldn't we save ourselves a whole lot of money and extra clauses and a whole lot of bureaucracy by dispensing with this office and just getting each government department and each deputy minister accountable for delivering information within their existing departmental resources. Why was that rejected in designing this bill?