Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Coulombe, with regard to warrants, some discussions have compared us to our Five Eyes partners and the fact that the same explicit text is not necessarily contained in other legislation from other countries. I wanted to confirm that we have been able to issue warrants since the CSIS Act was first established in 1984, and similar countries have the same abilities but maybe not necessarily the same wording in their legislation.
The problem we have here in Canada, as people recognize, is that we also have different court systems and the judiciary interprets laws differently. We have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which may not be identical to other countries as well.
The problem we have is that the courts have specifically called into question the ability of CSIS to operate overseas, to issue those types of warrants. The legislation, the very text we're putting in this new bill, will clarify, will clearly spell out the capabilities CSIS has always had, to ensure that the courts no longer call it into question. Is that a fair statement?
If you could, comment on that, please.