Public Safety committee  As an observer of this rather than an expert, I think the parliamentary oversight committee in the U.K. has worked okay. I've also testified in front of the U.S. House intelligence committee, and the comparison is quite striking, because the U.S. House intelligence committee literally has dozens of staff, whereas the U.K. parliamentary oversight committee has, I think, four or five staff.

Public Safety committee  Thank you.

Public Safety committee  I had the privilege of participating in the White House summit. Even though it got a lot of bad press afterwards, I think it was a very worthwhile initiative, because it highlighted the importance of prevention. It is very important to engage in counterterrorism, but counterterrorism in many ways is firefighting.

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much for the question. I am pleased to attend today's meeting. The Channel program is a very important program in the U.K. counterterrorism strategy. It is an intervention program, which means that if the police or other actors identify cases of high-risk people who are on the verge of engaging in violent extremism, those cases are then being referred to the Channel program, which brings together all the relevant stakeholders—the police, it could be welfare officers, it could be the school, it could be psychologists, it could be theological consultants—to figure out exactly what has gone wrong in that particular case and to work out a systematic intervention to prevent that person from going further and engaging in violent extremism.

Public Safety committee  Thank you very much. Chairman and ladies and gentlemen, my name is Peter Neumann. I'm director at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, and I'm also a professor at King's College London. I apologize for the fact that I cannot be with you in Ottawa today. I so appreciate the opportunity to talk to you from afar about terrorism and the distress that it poses.

Public Safety committee  Yes, you do. Thank you very much.