Public Safety committee  Good morning. I'd like to begin by thanking you for inviting me to appear before you today on behalf of the chair and the other committee members of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, SIRC. As SIRC's executive director, I will be speaking on their behalf. It is a privi

Public Safety committee  We'll share this response, if you don't mind. I'll let my counsel speak about the complaint process with you in a moment. To the extent that our legislation was devised in order to give us full authority to review the activities of CSIS, I would say we have no complaint about t

Public Safety committee  It's adequate for purposes of reviewing what CSIS's activities have been. You're right, we can't go further than CSIS. And if the government makes the decision that it wants a review body that can go further, then whoever it is will take on the role.

Public Safety committee  No, I don't think it's appropriate for me to comment. I will say, however, that when we did our report on Maher Arar, which as I noted was started before the commission of inquiry was struck, we did provide to the minister, who provided to Justice O'Connor, our report, in which

Public Safety committee  Yes.

Public Safety committee  That's correct.

Public Safety committee  Can I just take a moment to talk about “review” versus “oversight”?

Public Safety committee  I don't want to give you a university lecture, but I'm pretty religious about sticking to the term “review” because it was the intended role of SIRC vis-à-vis CSIS. “Oversight” would imply we are inside directing the day-to-day decisions of the organization, and therefore we woul

Public Safety committee  —there is a plethora of other models. In the Westminster system, we tend to see parliamentary committees. In the U.K. that's the case, in Australia that's the case, although in Australia they also have an inspector general, but that inspector general has a remit that allows him t

Public Safety committee  Let me say to begin with that I think you need to approach the work on the basis that CSIS is, as we are, a professional organization that takes pride in what they do. They take it seriously. The people who work there are recruited with great care. They are trained and they spend

Public Safety committee  I think that's a very good way of summarizing it.

Public Safety committee  No.

Public Safety committee  I'm assuming you're talking about the quasi-judicial aspect of our work.

Public Safety committee  Post 9/11, when the so-called PSAC budget, the Public Safety anti-terrorism budget, was enacted, we did say that if CSIS was going to have its budget increased by a substantial amount then we felt SIRC would need to have something reflective of that. We did make representations.

Public Safety committee  I'll deal with the latter question first. We've never seen any information to suggest that anything of this sort has been happening here. As for the first question, related to information obtained through torture, there is a decision that has been rendered by a member of this c