It's a testament to your endurance. I got a headache just listening to parts of the last panel.
I've had 20 years in the national security area. It's an area that's very fraught with challenges, where you have to have a healthy regard that someone is watching you. Everything's covert, everything's secret, and you think you're getting away with things. But one of the realities I tell people is that there's no such thing as a secret. It's useful for politicians to remember that too, especially if you're in government. They're tiny time capsules. Those things will blow up in your face after a day, a year, five years, or ten years; if there's anything wrong, it will come out.
If you look at the report that was released by the Inspector General in May of this year, she goes back over a period of time, and it is certainly written as a farewell piece. You'll see that I articulate in my brief some of the reasons for what she does, and what's unique in the work the Inspector General does.
One of the key things is that SIRC is largely a reactive body. They deal with highly strategic issues and public complaints. They can be asked to do something, and if they choose to they can do something the minister asks of them. The IG is there to serve the minister. The minister can say, “You do it for me because your job is to tell me. It's not to go out and tell the public”. You control the service's activities by operational policies and ministerial directives, plus obviously the law, because those come from mistakes that have been made in the past 28 years. I was their general counsel, so I know. I was there for a lot of the mistakes. I didn't necessarily make them, but how do you fix them? You control your IOs by developing policies.
The IG has a unique power: the ability to monitor. You don't see that kind of language used for SIRC, which does post-factor reviews. So the IG can actually monitor active investigative files to see how you are doing this, whether you have complied with those policies, and what kind of performance you are getting.
When I looked at it I didn't see anyone giving SIRC the power to monitor. As a matter of fact, I didn't see anyone transferring the files from the IG to SIRC for them to do anything. I don't know what's going to happen to them. Usually legislation would provide for some transition. Does that mean they just sit there, and 28 years of work dies? No money has been transferred, so that million dollars disappears. No personnel have been transferred, therefore no expertise. So you have someone who has some of the same things, but not the same powers.
If you look at what they do, they get down to the nitty-gritty. They'll tell you, “You've got problems with your computer system. You're not tracking the data. You're not tracking to whom or with whom you're sharing your data”. There's all sorts of stuff they do that's not otherwise being done.