I think there are two components to any sort of after-the-fact oversight of it, rather than a real-time review. I've said before other committees that I think real-time review is kind of silly. You can't have an investigator out there trying to do his investigation and at the same time being required to show up before a review committee. That's just not going to work. It has to be after-the-fact oversight, and I think there are two components to it.
There has to be an expert component to it—that is, people who are expert in the area of national security—and there has to be what I would characterize as a parliamentary review, which is the committee of parliamentarians.
The committee of parliamentarians is very important because it has democratic legitimacy. It can bring concerns from constituencies to the agencies and can conduct closed hearings as well. I think there is a democratic legitimacy to the committee of parliamentarians, augmented by expert review, which can be.... Justice O'Connor recommended a sort of “super-SIRC” across all the agencies. To the point my colleague was making, we were certainly of the view on Air India that there ought to be a national security adviser.
The expert review has to be across all the agencies, and there needs to be a panel as part of that, but also an independent reviewer, as they have in the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom, the independent reviewer is tasked often with particular instances, and I'll give one example for Canada: the tragic events on Parliament Hill. It might be important for the population to understand how this happened, what the intelligence agencies knew, and what they did not know. Was it something that could not have been prevented? An independent reviewer can dig in on an event like that in a way that no one, from a public consumption perspective, is actually doing.
From a public relations perspective, it is very important that the public understand what the agencies do. Frankly, a lot of what they do, they do very well. I think that oversight can deliver that message.