Thank you. I will try to respond to some of the questions on behalf of the committee and I hope that you will forgive me if I do not have some of the intricacies of some of the legal argument down. I will just try to tell you in plain language what our intent was and why we decided what we did.
I think the first point that needs to be made, because Ms. Lee just raised it, is that it should be clear that this committee has no power to sanction Mr. Selleck but the House does. We are free, if we wish, to parade Mr. Selleck out in front of us and discuss a process for sanctioning him. There is nothing stopping us from doing that. That has not been short-circuited. We can still deal with that.
Our committee certainly had concerns with Mr. Selleck and the CBC when they came before us, refused an interview to discuss with our legal counsel the nature of their testimony, but came before us and just waved this flag of journalistic privilege as sort of some blanket protection. They were not interested in the kinds of questions we might ask or where they might be relevant.
They wanted to wave this flag and essentially have us accept that as some sort of privilege that we could not question. Even in court, when the media or journalist have to appear in court, I do not know for sure but I would imagine that they cannot just roll into the court room and say, "Journalistic privilege, we have to leave." I would assume that they have to establish it somehow. The CBC and Mr. Selleck refused to do that in this case.
We thought that it was not worth pursuing after commenting on the actions in the report because it would have dragged this thing on for some time and it would have cost a lot of money. We knew we had to come before this House on October 23rd with our findings. I suppose we could take the CBC to court or we could sanction them here in the House and we could drag this out for a year or so, or maybe longer. I am not sure what that would accomplish but as I have said, this House is certainly free, and Ms. Lee is free to make a motion, if she wishes to do so, that we deal with sanctioning the CBC and Mr. Selleck in some manner. The committee did not think that was prudent, given that we thought we really needed to bring closure to this and this was a peripheral issue, not central to the bias and not central to the conduct of Members and staff. Thank you.