Thank you.
Thank you to the witnesses for your thoughtful comment and analysis. It's very helpful.
As you know, the CSIS Act is about 30 years old, so it certainly has not kept up with the rapidly evolving pace of the threats to our country, unfortunately.
The purpose of this bill is fairly simple; in fact, I believe someone has called it the “Filling Gaps Identified in Recent Court Cases Act”. There have been some questions that the court has raised and this bill attempts to address that, to give authority for CSIS to conduct investigations outside Canada, to confirm that the Federal Court can issue warrants for such investigation, to give the Federal Court authority to consider only relevant Canadian law, and to protect the identity of both CSIS sources and employees. There may be other areas that will have to be addressed, but this is the purpose of this law.
I wonder if either of the professors can tell us what kinds of requirements are on the intelligence communities in our allies: the Five Eyes, or in the countries we cooperate with. Are any of these required to get court warrants before they undertake activities in other countries? How is our regime comparable to those of our allies?