Procedure and House Affairs committee  Madam Chair, I'm a lawyer by background. Intelligence is not evidence; it's information. You can give it some more credibility by collecting more information by using other sources and technical methods to confirm the information. At the end of the day, intelligence is simply information you've received of whatever credibility you can attach to it.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Yes. Information that has not been confirmed, unless you have received it from a credible source, and it is really time-sensitive information.... There may be cases where information has to be moved up, but you would have to be very clear to whom you are providing that information, that its credibility is open to question.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I can't speak to the level the journalists go to, although most of the journalists I have known over the years do make efforts to confirm the information before they publish it. Having said that, the reality is that intelligence services do have ways of gaining credibility or giving credibility to information that is not really open to journalists.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Madam Chair, I think the simplest explanation for that, in my view, is that usually in the case of a whistle-blower, there is some element of disclosure of wrongdoing on the part of the government. In this case, nobody's really alleging that there's wrongdoing. People are alleging that the government should have done more.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  In a sense, Madam Chair, I agree with the member's point that—and I said it a second ago—the government probably should have acted on foreign interference perhaps earlier than it has and more determinedly than it has. Having said that, foreign interference is a very large problem, and most of the discussion, frankly, that I've seen is on a relatively narrow part of foreign interference in this country.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Madam Chair, while I may not agree with everything in or all of Mr. Cooper's reports—news reports, after all, are news stories, not necessarily fact—the reality is that the things we need to do are broader than simply registries. We need more counter-intelligence work because you need to identify all of the activities, which means more funding, probably, for CSIS.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Madam Chair, it certainly is important to have close connections to diaspora communities. It is sometimes rather more difficult than the honourable member might suggest, or might appear to suggest, in a sense that many parts of the community are unwilling to come forward and to have discussions.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Madam Chair, I have given advice to prime ministers in the past. I'm not sure that in this case I would know enough to give advice to this particular Prime Minister. I do think that the government probably could have acted faster on issues of foreign interference, which is a serious issue, although sometimes I disagree with what people see as serious and not-so-serious foreign interference.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Madam Chair, I think the way to create that is ultimately for Canadians to have an interest in national security issues, to pay attention to those issues and to demand that their elected representatives also pay attention to those issues. In my view, elected officials are wise people.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Madam Chair, in response to the honourable member's question, it's rarely hard for intelligence services. Once they get beyond the idea that you're collecting secret intelligence and you've decided you have to share it, most intelligence agencies want to share intelligence information with higher levels of government.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Madam Chair, I think one can over-complicate the issue of providing flow of information. There are challenges to providing information to anybody beyond the service, because what you're talking about is counter-espionage operations, which are very sensitive and very difficult, so the disclosure of information that discloses the existence of investigations is complicated.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  The hope, Madam Chair, on the part of many people in the intelligence and national security community was that talking more about issues of national security would cause people to care more about it. I suspect that probably doesn't really happen. I suspect it requires something more like the current discussion.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Madam Chair, in response to the honourable member's question, it's a bit of a challenge to make a short answer. The issue of foreign interference is really just espionage. It is a subset of espionage involving sometimes not necessarily intelligence services but foreign actors.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  In trying to determine who the leaker is, one alternative is that there was a political motivation. I can't be certain about that because I obviously don't know who the leaker is. At this point, as far as we know, nobody knows who the leaker is. Certainly that would be a possible motivation.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Madam Chair, thank you very much for the introduction. I don't have any prepared remarks, but I'm happy to try to answer any questions members may have. Obviously, I am still subject to security of information legislation, so there are limits to what I can say, even from my memories.