Public Safety committee  Quite candidly, one of the issues that you face in managing organizations such as ours is that it's very circumscribed in what it can and cannot say publicly. That's a real handicap, quite frankly, because in many instances our protection of national security confidences is actua

Public Safety committee  I would hope it would have a positive impact on public confidence. As you know, most western intelligence services do have some form of parliamentary or congressional legislative review. Personally, I think there would be some benefit to having that in terms of, at a minimum, dev

Public Safety committee  I would say it is generally a strength in some respects, partly because of the recognition by employees of our organization that virtually anything and everything they do is subject to third-party review over the course of the year. That has the effect of generating perhaps a hig

Public Safety committee  No.

Public Safety committee  Let me try to answer. As Mr. Justice O'Connor concluded in his report, officials of CSIS--the organization and anyone in it--did not provide any information to any foreign government about Mr. Arar. The information provided to the United States was provided by the RCMP. Going b

Public Safety committee  I guess the shortest and most frank reply is that I do not know the answer to that question.

Public Safety committee  If I may, I'd like to just clarify a few things about your question. CSIS did not share information with any foreign government about Mr. Arar.

Public Safety committee  I was just trying to be more specific, because I'm here speaking only on behalf of CSIS. To get to the point of your question, though, I said in my opening comments, in part in response to other reviews that have been done, including the SIRC review of Mr. Arar's case, that CSIS

Public Safety committee  Any information that we now provide to a foreign government with respect to an individual is heavily caveated in terms of how it may be used. As I said in my opening comments, we're much more rigorous in terms of doing assessments on a foreign country's records and practices, whi

Public Safety committee  I think I would agree with Mr. Justice O'Connor's conclusions in that regard, which is to say that both agencies have a role to play in national security areas. Our role tends to be very much more on the intelligence front and the RCMP's tends to be much more in the realm of proc

Public Safety committee  First of all, neither I nor anybody else in the Canadian government can take responsibility, I think, for anything that Syrian embassy officials tell you about Mr. Arar. With respect to the issue of leaks, regarding Mr. Arar or his circumstances, I said in my opening statement

Public Safety committee  I think Mr. Justice O'Connor has dealt with the issue of the reliability assessment at some length and come to his conclusions on that. Some were based on the fact that he judged that the individual responsible for that at the time did not have the appropriate training or backgro

Public Safety committee  One would hope.

Public Safety committee  Hypothetically, that would be a reasonable conclusion, but it's not necessarily true in all cases. I don't know that I would be able to confirm absolutely that it would be the case.

Public Safety committee  In an ideal circumstance, that would certainly be an expectation.