Thank you, Chair.
If my friend Mr. Arya wants to get into the weeds on this, we can. I'm not letting go.
What made this particular situation different is that this time the analysis, which would normally be available as a stand-alone document that could readily be accessed, was included within a cabinet submission. As a rule, that would be part of the recommendation and it would be off-site. So we had this overlap where the Auditor General was entitled to get at it, but it was contained within a document labelled in such a way that he couldn't.
It has taken all this time for sunny ways to suddenly realize that you cannot just stand on this technicality and that this analysis needs to come out—or an admission that the analysis wasn't done.
I am more than willing to get into this, and we will be getting into the detailed weeds on this. I could be wrong, but my experience tells me that we are ultimately going to have to bring in the parliamentary law clerk.
The Auditor General right now cannot tell us with any certainty whether or not we have the power and, if we do, how we can go about exercising it to get information that goes before the mandate of the current government.
I'd be surprised if there was anybody on this committee who would take the position that it's not that important that the Auditor General get everything, that as long as he gets most of it, it will sort of be okay. That's not the way we do things around here.
We'd bring in, I would think, the parliamentary law clerk. I hope that we have much of that discussion in public, as a bit of a service, so that people can watch and learn as we talk about how the law works. Then, it would be my suggestion that we move in camera and take the instant case. We would get legal advice, which would be properly in camera, in terms of actions that we may or may not want to take or to make to Parliament, which is the ultimate reservoir of all this power.
Having said that, I would like to make sure that we don't leave here today without putting a special focus on the RCMP and mental health issues. I don't think we've had a chance to turn our minds to that yet, and we should. It's going to be one of the things that we look at very carefully as a group, and I don't think I'm speaking out of school when I say it's a unanimous slam dunk that we're doing a hearing on this one.
As I understand it so far, Auditor General, they were the first to come out with some of these measures. That makes it extremely important for the rest of the government. If this is the lead one, it needs to work. The plan was there, but the failure is in the implementation of the plan.
You made reference to it in your opening remarks, but I'd like you to return to it and put a focus on the key issues that you think we need to drill down on in terms of what has gone wrong with mental health services for our RCMP officers.