Mr. Casey, I think it's an excellent question.
Let me first give you my view of the nature of the critiques, and they're very close to the way in which you present them. One of the responses to any kind of measure to reform the nature of the parliamentary review of security and intelligence in Canada is an argument that existing departmentally focused, if you like, parliamentary committees can adequately do this job. This committee can adequately review the security and intelligence practices of the Canadian community.
It seems to me that there are two problems, perhaps more than two problems, but two problems that immediately come to mind with that.
One is that, in terms of parliamentary committees' construction focused on the activities of individual government departments, that's not how the Canadian security and intelligence community writ large is actually organized. It's an integrated or semi-integrated collection of different agencies operating under different departmental mandates and controls. One of the things that the Arar inquiry pointed out is that we lack any capacity with regard to an independent review body to look at that overall work of the security and intelligence community and, in regard to Parliament, we don't have that capacity at the moment to do that integrated kind of review. As my colleague Craig suggests as well, there is a deep problem in terms of access to the kind of information that a parliamentary committee or a committee of parliamentarians would genuinely need in order to scrutinize properly the activities of a secretive intelligence and security community.
There are models that have been made to work among our Five Eyes partners that are of long standing. The model that we have typically looked to post 9/11 in Canada has been the British model, the model for the intelligence and security committee, which is a rather unusual construction, admittedly. It's a committee of parliamentarians, not a standard parliamentary committee. It was built that way on the assumption that it would provide better access to classified information according to the provisions available to them and that it would also generate significant sustained, serious, non-partisan discussion of these issues if it was constructed in a certain manner.
I assisted Joyce Murray in the construction of her private member's bill, and we looked at various models very seriously, but I think the essence of what parliament needs is a dedicated committee that can look at the broad range of security intelligence operations that may need to require membership of both the House and the Senate. It would certainly need additional resources compared to what an ordinary parliamentary committee would have in terms of research staff and it would need—