The Standing Senate Committee on Official Languages

has the honour to table its

SEVENTH REPORT

On Thursday, March 1, Senator Corbin raised a question in the Senate concerning a possible leak of the 5th report of the Senate Standing Committee on Official Languages: Reflecting Canada’s Linguistic Duality at the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games: A Golden Opportunity.

The same morning the report was tabled, an article published in the Vancouver Sun suggested that the journalist had access to confidential information. Senator Corbin did not raise a question of privilege in accordance with Rule 43, but the Chair still promised, on behalf of the Committee, to have the incident investigated.

Your committee met on March 19, 2007, and created a working group consisting of senators Chaput, Comeau and Tardif in order to study appropriate measures to investigate the supposed leak.

The working group met on March 27, 2007.  The group reviewed the procedures that the Committee had followed to ensure the security of the confidential report. For example, the Committee had numbered all the copies of the report, someone had to sign to confirm receipt of the confidential document, and senators and their staff were reminded of the importance of protecting confidential documents.  The working group thus concluded that the Committee had respected the practices proposed by the Standing Committee on Privileges, Standing Rules and Orders in its report tabled and adopted by the Senate on April 13, 2000.

The Committee also charged the Chair with contacting all the members of the Committee in an effort to find the source of the supposed leak. The members were invited individually to discuss this matter with the members of their staff and to report their conclusions to the Chair. Your committee took the allegations of a leak very seriously, but despite their conscientious efforts, the Committee was unable to identify the source of the presumed leak.

Respectfully submitted,

MARIA CHAPUT
Chair