Côté, alone among the justices, applies “minimal impairment” logic — so familiar to us all from the court’s Charter jurisprudence — to the non-Charter question of whether Parliament had the power to create the NSICOP system. The NSICOP rules don’t actually require any tailored definition of, or harm-based justification for, protected secrets. If the government is “taking measures to protect” an innocuous but politically embarrassing fact, it becomes forever unspeakable by NSICOP members. Moreover, if a NSICOP official-secrets prosecution goes before the courts, the law offers Parliament no mechanism whatsoever to step in and block that prosecution.