Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and honourable members. My colleague, Mr. Platsis, and I would like to thank you for inviting us to testify today regarding this important issue. We serve as program directors for the Centre of Excellence in Security, Resilience, and Intelligenc

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think within that 1% you'll find a range of people, from those who just don't like us very much, to people who can present a very serious danger. Regrettably, historically, Canada has experienced elements of both of those extremes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you, Mr. Opitz. There's a lot. The biggest threat is the one we've defined as our point of departure. That, of course, is the fact that the rate of change that is continually accelerating, which affects us in every possible dimension of national activity, is far outpacing

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As a quick addition to that, I think biometrics is something we need to look at very clearly. But I think we're at an interim step. Ultimately the biometric that will define activities and travel in the world is probably going to be DNA-based, but until we get to that time, we

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I would think we have few, if any, files on most of the people we cannot identify. That's why we can't identify them.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think your question underlines our point. I believe if we had more effective intelligence, if we were more effectively pre-screening before people landed in Canada, we would have far less of a problem or far less of a concern with respect to the respective rights of individuals

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The critical question isn't time; the critical question is information. That is to say, on what basis do you review your five minutes? If you have a complete or a reasonably complete file that has been vetted by someone who understands the nature of the file itself—and that would

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I will defer to Mr. Singh.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think the critical variable is how efficiently current resources are used, and how they are incorporated in a common database. My colleague talked about silos. We're not sharing information effectively, so it's difficult to make an informed assessment in the time we have and wi

Citizenship and Immigration committee  What I would like to see is more interoperability. I think more interoperability with the current resources would establish our baseline on where we are and where we need to go and be. In my view, that interoperability would focus and centre around a common database—a very well-s

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We don't determine intent on a five-minute review of a file. If we have a concern, we start with a risk assessment. If we see a potential risk, then what we are increasingly dependent on, in a particular case or cases, is getting additional intelligence until such point as we are

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We shorten the process as a function of the application of technology. If we have common, effective databases, we have a greater capacity to respond externally as opposed to internally. Those databases can be assembled in Canada and made available to those making the decisions at

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Respectfully, the timing issue has to be secondary to the consideration of our national interests. What that means is to ask what other countries do. One of the things other countries do is operate foreign intelligence services, precisely, among other things, for the purpose of g

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I am a reserve officer with the Canadian armed forces.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I'm not going to take issue with the 0.01%, if you're looking at terrorism. I think what has changed is fundamentally the capability of a single individual to perpetrate very significant acts of terrorism against the country. It's not the number that is critical; it's what's do