Public Safety committee  That's okay.

Public Safety committee  I think it would be hard to find examples of purely successful data retention.

Public Safety committee  I think everybody is working according to the same best practices in terms of secure data storage and surrounding it with privacy protections. That would certainly be true for all of our Five Eyes partners, but really the challenge grows exponentially with the more information you have that you're trying to secure.

Public Safety committee  Thank you, Ms. Damoff. I am not completely aware of what Statistics Canada does with this information or how regularly it reports it. I still think there would be value in putting a requirement into Bill C-21 legislation for an annual public report, without specifying exactly what should go into that.

Public Safety committee  Ms. Damoff, I actually thought about that. It's very much up to members of Parliament to decide on that. I suppose my personal view, for what it's worth, is that Parliament has a lot of onerous duties around reviewing bills on a schedule. If there had to be a trade-off to building in a scheduled review of this act as opposed to Bill C-59, for example, I would rather see it in something more significant, like Bill C-59, than this one.

Public Safety committee  Dr. Leitch, thank you for the question. My simple answer would be that the technological cost of data acquisition is coming down dramatically, virtually every minute of our lives. What has not changed is the challenge of making sense of that data, although there is always a kind of technological impulse to assume that there is some perfect equation, an algorithmic equation that's going to solve that problem for you.

Public Safety committee  I would say 1:10—one to the technology, 10 to the human element.

Public Safety committee  I'm sorry, but I'm not an expert on the CRA's functions. I assume it has to do with keeping a watch on individuals who are not complying with Canada's tax laws, but I'm kind of at sea about this. I just pay my taxes.

Public Safety committee  I'll do my best on this. Again, I don't feel I have any kind of perfect or solid answer for the committee on this, but I think the approach is to stream it according to the different objectives of Bill C-21 in terms of the concerns that it's meant to deal with, and to keep in mind as well that Bill C-21 information, entry-exit information, is going to be only a small piece to a larger informational puzzle that you might need to apply to particular cases.

Public Safety committee  Mr. Spengemann, thank you. My answer to that question would be yes, absolutely. But I think it also reinforces at least my sense that what we're dealing with, with those kinds of cases in particular, are matters of immediate concern and emergency measures, if you like, where you want to have the ability to track exit as quickly as possible.

Public Safety committee  In a way, it's a challenge in Canadian-American relations, rather than a challenge for strictly Canadian border enforcement provisions. I think this is particularly true with regard to the legalization of marijuana. How that would be treated across the border is an issue that remains to be seen.

Public Safety committee  It doesn't give rise, in my mind, to significant concerns, insofar as that discretionary ability is surrounded by other strong protections in the law, not least the charter, and one hopes that it would be exercised in a common-sense way. Where it comes back into play, in terms of our conversation, would be, again, in the importance and value of an annual report, which would detail problems of that kind, and the importance of an independent complaints mechanism to handle specific cases.

Public Safety committee  I am inclined to be frivolous about this—I know I shouldn't. I am now a senior myself, officially, although somehow I don't get to travel to Florida. I would hope that a Canadian value of common sense and moderation would kick in on this. I appreciate that we are leaving it to regulation.

Public Safety committee  Thank you.

Public Safety committee  Sure. Thank you, Ms. Leitch. On the transparency part first, I think that's the easiest one in terms of building a requirement in the legislation that there should be a public annual reporting to Parliament on the performance of Bill C-21. It would be one of the occasions on which CBSA would come before Parliament to really explain how they're performing.