Hon. Mobina S. B. Jaffer: Senator Gold, thank you very much for your presentation.

The National Security and Defence Committee has a very competent steering committee, and they chose 12 witnesses. You are saying that we didn’t have children appear before our committee. These witnesses are well-known people who, I’m sure, have studied this material. I think it’s a little unfair to say that they couldn’t speak for the children. I can’t repeat the words you said because I don’t have them in front of me, but I think it’s a bit unfair.

The steering committee had an opportunity to call those witnesses. They could have called children if they had deemed it necessary. As chair, I have done that a number of times. The fact that they called 12 credible people to the committee, do you not think they were able to balance the number of witnesses? Don’t you think you were unfair in the way you addressed those witnesses who appeared before us and provided good testimony?

Senator Jaffer: Senator Gold, I didn’t for a minute say that you had not done a good job. You have. You expressed your position. I only took issue with how you addressed the very good witnesses that appeared before the committee. I didn’t want to raise this in my speech, because then you wouldn’t have had an opportunity to speak on this.

I have another question for you. To my question about note taking, the minister said that whether or not the person has committed a contravention, notes will be taken about that person. The minister was very specific about this.

Then the Privacy Commissioner appeared before us and said there have been six complaints about the poor standard of note taking by officials, and that he’s been very unhappy with the standard of note taking. Then the officials said that no more funds would be spent to bring in this new threshold.

Where is the protection? They indicated that they will take notes if they stop somebody, even if the contravention doesn’t happen, but the Privacy Commissioner says he’s not happy with the note taking.