Problem of confidentiality of Committee Reports.

• Author: Fisher, Douglas

On February 11, 1999, the Standing Committee on Procedure and House of Affairs began investigating the problem of confidential committee reports being leaked to the media prior to being presented in the House of Commons. It held several meet and heard from witnesses such as: Robert Marleau, Clerk of the House of Commons, Rob Walsh, Clerk Assistant and General Legislative Counsel; Diane Davidson, General Legal Counsel; Bill Graham, MP, Chair of the Liaison Committee; Jules Richer, President of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery, Joseph Maingot former Law Clerk and Parliamentary Counsel, and Derek Lee, MP. Another wit was Douglas Fisher.

Let me make my point about the issue of leaked committee reports by way of three anecdotes based on my years as a Member of Parliament.

Dynamics of

My first tale deals with the political dynamics of in camera meetings. When I first came to the House of Commons, Parliament was not all focused around Question Period. Debates, particularly debates in the evening, were quite important. You might get as many as a hundred MPs listening to a debate. That was fantastic. There was very little committee work done. There were really no more than four or five committees active during a year, and I suppose the only one that was big and tended to make big news regularly was the transport committee, because every year they dealt with Air Canada and the CNR. Another lively one was the broadcasting committee, which dealt with the CBC.

The Diefenbaker Government was elected in 1957, determined to change the broadcasting system. The CBC not only ran the CBC; it ran broadcasting. The Conservatives were going to bring in a new regime, and they did. It was called the Board of Broadcast Governors. The Liberals fought it, and our party, which was then the CCF, was against it. But the Broadcasting Act was changed, and we created this board which was really the ancestor of the CRTC.

In 1959 a movement developed in the Conservative Party, led in the west by the very marvellous-talking MP -- Art Smith from Calgary. Art provided the persuasiveness, and another fellow -- a Tory MP by the name of Jack McIntosh from Swift Current -- provided what you might call the muscle. They decided they were going to do something serious about the CBC and the cost of the CBC to the taxpayers.

They had the idea that CBC television should go out and get a lot of revenue from commercials. They brought it to the broadcasting committee and they were determined to get a recommendation for it. Stop and think about that if you get tired of all those commercials on Hockey Night in Canada. Way back then, the CBC was not making any money, to speak of, out of television commercials.

This issue came out in the committee scrutiny of the CBC and we went through the...