Public Safety committee  Very quickly, I'll refer you to our written submissions on the green paper, which hopefully are before the committee. Basically, there are two aspects of our suggestions for the things that need to be changed if this program is going to continue. One is to provide an objectively

Public Safety committee  To be clear, our suggestion is not for either one or the other. Our suggestion is for both. Our proposal is that both are necessary, much like this committee and the RCMP complaints commissioner both serve important purposes in the oversight of the RCMP.

Public Safety committee  I'm sorry. When I say “independent of Parliament”, I should be clear that the suggestion isn't that they're not reporting to Parliament, or are somehow supreme with regard to Parliament, or more important than or separate from Parliament. The issue with the committee of parliamen

Public Safety committee  The first comment I would make with respect to the decision of Justice Noël is that the underlying problem—which we see across the board in our national security agencies—is a lack of transparency. What would be very helpful to a discussion about national security issues is trans

Public Safety committee  I believe that that focus is for geographical reasons. It has to do with the flights that begin and end in Canada that go through U.S. air space, but otherwise the no-fly lists—

Public Safety committee  There are problems, but those problems would arise anyway. If you want to get into the United States, you're going to need to adhere to their laws, whether their laws are reasonable or not. Whether we agree with their laws or not is somewhat irrelevant, in the sense that they're

Public Safety committee  The Canadian Bar Association is in the process of studying bills C-21 and C-23. We will have some proposals for you once they have been approved. Currently, they are at the revision stage. We do indeed have concerns with how the measures proposed in those bills will work, as wel

Public Safety committee  If this is a practical question about how the no-fly lists work, each country implements its own no-fly list. The challenge that we have, and I think that was being addressed earlier, was that many flights in Canada that begin and end in Canada, fly over U.S. air space. That's on

Public Safety committee  My concern is what we're not aware of—in other words, what no one is aware of, because there is nobody, beyond perhaps the Minister of Public Safety.... But even the Minister of Public Safety doesn't necessarily have an overview of everything that's happening. Perhaps that's a qu

Public Safety committee  They would be able to look into it once they're up and running, presumably, if the scope of their mandate is broad enough to encompass.... Right now, the scope that is set out in Bill C-22 is a third definition of national security. In other words, it doesn't refer to either the

Public Safety committee  In part, we see shortcomings in transparency. A good example would be the decision by Justice Noël last year with respect to the definitions of metadata and associated data that were being used within CSIS. Although CSIS has it own review agency, that agency, as we've seen in rec

Public Safety committee  I'll pass that to Mr. Carter.

Public Safety committee  To be clear, CBA's position is not that information sharing in and of itself is a problem. In fact, one of the problems highlighted by the Air India commission was a lack of information sharing and coordination between agencies. The issue is with how that was implemented in C-51

Public Safety committee  I think the most concrete example we have for on-the-ground lack of oversight is with respect to the Canada Border Services Agency. That agency only had internal oversight mechanisms. If you look at the RCMP, for example, the RCMP has an independent complaints commission and a co

Public Safety committee  Thank you. Thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. The discussion focuses on many appropriate aspects of national security, including a number that have been raised in the government's Green Paper. Three aspects are of specific concern to us. The first, the most