Senator Austin: Honourable senators, I am saying that Mr. Justice Gomery is not restrained from drawing conclusions of fact and indicating who carried out what actions.

1. For the purposes of applying point 1 of Article 1 of Directive 2003/6/EC, information shall be deemed to be of a precise nature if it indicates a set of circumstances which exists or may reasonably be expected to come into existence or an event which has occurred or may reasonably be expected to do so and if it is specific enough to enable a conclusion to be drawn as to the possible effect of that set of circumstances or event on the prices of financial instruments or related derivative financial instruments.

It is therefore irrelevant that the Commission only notified the French authorities and not the beneficiary of its State aid concerns. Finally, the CFI agreed that a beneficiary of State aid, that was granted without the proper notification procedure cannot have any legitimate expectation that the aid will never be recovered.

3. Endorses the Commission's analysis of the fishery sector's contribution to food security and the need to give priority to the nutritional requirements of local communities;

The information available at this stage does not allow any conclusions as to the reasons why joint referrals have not been made in the cases where a transaction has undergone multiple national notifications.

In response to the arguments of opposition members on this question of privilege, the Minister of National Defence stated categorically, and I quote, “At no time have I intended to mislead this House—” and then went on to explain the context in which he had made statements that ultimately proved to be contradictory (1005) [English] As the hon. member for Acadie Bathurst has pointed out, in deciding on alleged questions of privilege, it is relatively infrequent for the Chair to find prima facie privilege; it is much more likely that the Speaker will characterize the situation as “a dispute as to facts”.