I think you're right. And short of a debate on going to war or declaring bankruptcy, I have trouble imagining what sort of national emergency would compel His Excellency to pull that alarm trigger. This (the AG report whose draft is showing) certainly doesn't come close.

Hm. Actually, LKO may have a point.

It requires him to TABLE it within any of the first 15 sitting days. Naturally he cannot table it when the House is not sitting.

It makes no restrictions at all on the report being released. Such a release would still be unofficial, and the report would not truly be "accepted" until it was tabled in parliament and they announced their agreement with it. But I think he could release it.

Maybe I misinterpreted her post then.

Good.

Cats belong in a box.

E. Schrödinger

The Speaker IS an MP

Is this some life or death issue for you or something?

I learned this stuff in Civics class 50 years ago, so it's not exactly news to anyone

Mmmhmmm and Milliken is finito

Speaker of what?

Well, I would say that receiving a report from the AG is an "administrative aspect of running the institution", and further that the moment he gets a report he's under no obligation that I can find to keep it secret until it's laid before Parliament.

That said, where in the Act is the Speaker limited to only "administrative" powers?

I think if he were to make the report public and not go through the prescribed route, he would be in contempt

The Act simply says that the Report must be laid before the House in a timely manner, it does NOT establish the tabling of the Report before the House as the "prescribed manner" for making the report public.

If I understand this properly, the only permissible mechanism for making this publicly available is through the House.

Where do you get that from?

The AG Act says that the Speaker must lay any reports he gets from the AG before the House within a certain time frame (either "forthwith" if the House is sitting, or within the first 15 sitting days once the House returns if it's not sitting when the report is given to the Speaker). Other than that, where in the law is the Speaker prevented from making such a report public before he lays it before the House?

As for the bit about leaks, the important point there is AT THE SAME TIME. The House "is careful to keep to itself the right to collectively have access to information at the same time" so that, for example, the government can't spend a month with a leaked report figuring out how to react to the report before the opposition sees it (or conversely the opposition can't spend months figuring out how to bludgeon the government with a leaked report before the government sees it). If the AG gives the Report to Milliken tomorrow and he scans it and puts it up on a public website somewhere then everyone in Canada will have access to the report at the same time.

I agree, Be-rad – what LKO is musing about is inviting the Speaker to step completely outside the statutory and regulatory provisions that govern matters such as these because, in his view at least, those provisions don't expressly prohibit him from doing so.

Despite the ongoing focus on the AG and her report, the most pertinent fact, IMO, is being overlooked – the Libs could have had the AG's report in hand to make whatever political hay they wished to out of it had they merely held off on toppling the government for 10 more days – the report was scheduled to be released April 5. I think it's fair to assume that one of the reasons the Libs didn't wait was, based on their own review of whatever draft of the report they had at the time, they didn't think there was much political hay to be realized by waiting.

My only "axe to grind" is that transparency should be the rule if not explicitly prohibited by statute. If Parliament intended reports from the AG to be released to the public only through the mechanism of being tabled in the House of Commons, and they therefore intended to prevent the Speaker from releasing said reports to the public in any other fashion, then the should have WRITTEN THAT DOWN.

The very SECOND the Report is tabled in the House it is available to Parliament, sure, but it's also available to the public at that moment as well. Saying that the statute authorizes the Speaker to table the Report in the House of Commons but that there's nothing authorizing him to release it to the public is like saying that a statute authorizes the Speaker to broadcast the contents of some report during every commercial break of American Idol, and Hockey Night in Canada but that there's nothing in the statute that authorizes the Speaker to "release it to the public". Tabling the Report in the House IS releasing the document to the public, and to my mind, if Parliament intended this route to be the ONLY allowable mechanism for such a report to be released to the public, they should have said so. When it comes to the releasing of accountability documents to the citizens of Canada, I think that if statutes are unclear, the bias should be in favour of RELEASING accountability information to the people, not hiding it. Apparently I'm in a minority there though?

"Parliament could, I suppose, keep the tabled report from being made public".

How does one keep a tabled report from being made public? Once the report is tabled it is part of the public record by definition, is it not? Keeping the document from being made public would require it to NOT be tabled in the House of Commons. Documents tabled in the House of Commons are part of the public record. The whole reason reports like this are tabled in the House of Commons is to make them a part of the public record. Tabling the report in the House isn't something that is done before the report is made public, it is the mechanism through which the report is made public.

To my mind, saying that a report can be kept from the public after it has been tabled is like saying that a television show can be kept off the airwaves after it's already been aired. A tabled report is public. I'm pretty sure keeping a tabled report from becoming public would require a flux capacitor and a DeLorean.

No. None of those documents has been tabled in the House of Commons.

Some of those documents are being provided to a small group of Parliamentarians who are basically going over them in private and deciding whether or not the rest of their colleagues should be allowed to see them. More importantly NONE of those Afghhan detainee documents has been tabled in the House of Commons. If they had been, you and I would be able to look up those documents online. Tabling documents in the House makes them public. It's why we insist that government accountability reports be tabled in the House.

What's going on with the Afghan detainee documents is a process to determine whether or not it's appropriate for these documents to become public. For now, they're secret from everyone who's not a part of the group of MPs who are currently doing that work. Were they laid before the House of Commons they'd then become public.

Tabling a document in the House is the parliamentary equivalent of entering something into evidence in a court of law. Once it's tabled, everyone can see it. In fact, making documents public is arguably one of the reasons documents are required to be laid before the House at all.

Okay, but what prevented Parliament from having the AG release her reports directly to the public instead?

I'd say tradition mostly. Laying reports before the House of Commons is just the traditional way of releasing documents to the public. It goes back to pre-internet and mass communication days I'm afraid, when the best way to ensure that all Parliamentarians had access to documents like these AT THE SAME TIME (such that no party had the advantage of seeing "public" documents weeks before other Parliamentarians from other parties did) in an era when there were no telephones, or T.V., or internet, was to table those documents in the House of Commons as soon as the House was in session.

Also, the public is clearly above Parliament on the org chart imho, but that doesn't mean that every individual member of the public should have unfettered access to secret national security documents. To my mind, those two points are entirely separate.

Wasn't there this same problem with a PBO report last election? That didn't seem very complicated to solve.Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network

I believe many analysts at the time figured the parties didn't want to be seen voting down the budget, so this contempt stuff was a more juicy steak to bite into instead.

In fact, the Liberals love so much of the not-yet-passed budget that even the CBC had to diss Ignatieff's team for dishonestly entering "zero" in the cost columns of some of their Red-Book-2011 promises that were identical to the proposed Flaherty budget provisions.

"But I am cynical enough to wonder if the Opposition new that the leaked draft would be more damaging than the actual report & are playing us knowing there is no way the AG report will be released before the house is sitting. "

Not just cynical but wise. It is essentially never the case that a final auditor report is worse than a first draft, simply because the purpose of the draft is to present preliminary findings to the audit subject so that subject can provide further information and representations on those findings. As often as not, that further information results in resolution of many of the preliminary findings and they do not appear in the final report. There is far more political hay to be made by demanding the AG release her report, knowing she won't, than from the actual final report itself.

There is no other interpretation possible than that 1) the House of Commons has to be sitting, and 2) that the Speaker has to wait until it is sitting to *lay each such report before [it]".

Yes, the House of Commons has to be sitting for the report to be tabled. I don't care about the report being tabled. The Speaker can table the report as stipulated in the act when the House is re-constituted. If he had the report right now though, he could also throw it up on his website right now, and I still challenge anyone to point to something in our laws that says he couldn't do that, because I haven't seen that yet. The House has to be sitting for the report to be laid before it, I agree. Now, where does it indicate that laying the report before the House of Commons is the only thing anyone is allowed to do with the report? Again, "You must do X" is not "You must only do X and nothing else". It just isn't.

Also, apologies for the "shouting". I'm not really shouting, it's just easier and faster to use all caps for emphasis than it is to throw in HTML tags.

Also, I suppose that you're right that your interpretation could be what Parliament intended, however, generally when there's disagreement between what our laws actually say, and what we think Parliament intended them to say, we're still ruled by what our laws actually say. It's like the veiled voting thing. Parliament may have INTENDED that voters in veils have their faces checked to verify their identity, but as the law they wrote does not actually require a voter to show photo id (i.e. the thing you'd check their face against) then regardless of Parliament's intent the law does not require voters in veils to have their faces checked to verify their identity.

I really firmly believe that if Parliament intended government accountability reports to be kept from the public during elections, that's the sort of thing they need to lay out specifically and explicitly. There are certainly stipulations to legislation that I could see a court "reading in" to a statute that doesn't clearly express the intent of Parliament, but I just can't see a judge "reading in" a requirement to keep government accountability documents secret during an election that's not explicitly there in the law.