A Pilgrim's Journal

And for that, I say a sincere thank-you to him.

The text of the full decision can be found here.

Basically, he gave all parties two weeks to work out a solution, yet upheld the power of the House over the power of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister answers to Parliament, not the other way around.

Here are some quotes from the ruling, which you may have seen elsewhere, but that I thought were especially important:

	It is the view of the Chair that accepting an unconditional
	authority of the executive to censor the information provided to
	Parliament would in fact jeopardize the very separation of powers
	that is purported to lie at the heart of our parliamentary system
	and the independence of its constituent parts.	Furthermore,
	it risks diminishing the inherent privileges of the House and
	its Members, which have been earned and must be safeguarded.

Regarding the Conservative plan to let an "independent" Mr. Iacobucci to decide what documents are secret or not:

	However, several Members have pointed out that Mr. Iacobucci's
	appointment establishes a separate, parallel process outside of
	parliamentary oversight, and without parliamentary involvement.
	Furthermore, and in my view perhaps most significantly,
	Mr. Iacobucci reports to the Minister of Justice; his client is
	the Government.

It's not that Mr. Iacobucci can't be impartial. It's that it sidesteps the entire issue of the Prime Minister answering to the House.

And part of the conclusion:

	Finding common ground will be difficult.  There have been
	assertions that colleagues in the House are not sufficiently
	trustworthy to be given confidential information, even with
	appropriate security safeguards in place.  I find such comments
	troubling.  The insinuation that Members of Parliament cannot be
	trusted with the very information that they may well require to
	act on behalf of Canadians runs contrary to the inherent trust
	that Canadians have placed in their elected officials and which
	Members require to act in their various parliamentary capacities.
 
	The issue of trust goes in the other direction as well.  Some
	suggestions have been made that the Government has self-serving
	and ulterior motives for the redactions in the documents tabled.
	Here too, such remarks are singularly unhelpful to the aim of
	finding a workable accommodation and ultimately identifying
	mechanisms that will satisfy all actors in this matter.
 
	But the fact remains that the House and the Government have,
	essentially, an unbroken record of some 140 years of collaboration
	and accommodation in cases of this kind.  It seems to me that it
	would be a signal failure for us to see that record shattered in
	the Third Session of the Fortieth Parliament because we lacked
	the will or the wit to find a solution to this impasse.

I'm glad that there is now such a precedent-setting ruling that puts limits on the government's claims of "national security" to keep things secret. Whatever party forms government in Canada, now or in the future, would be wise to keep this in mind, for the sake of Canada itself.