Foreign Affairs Committee on Oct. 24th, 2016

[Andrew LeFrank]

Certainly our Five Eyes partners are critical partners, most notably the United States because of the close interaction and trade between our two countries. We exchange best practices regarding ways that we identify potential shipments. We also exchange intelligence with our partners on potential individuals and countries with regard to their modus operandi, in particular dealing with shipment needs and emerging goods that could have dual use or potentially serious use issues in hostile countries.

[Michael Levitt, Liberal, York Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you, colleagues. We're now finished the first round. We'll go to the second round, and we'll start with Mr. Miller.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony.

You've heard today that we're examining potential holes in the current legislative scheme, including what may be missing, what's desirable, and what's needed to fix it. There has been some focus on human rights violations. It sounds as though in the legislative scheme you operate under there isn't a hole and that it's just a question of being able to do your job.

The issue I want to focus on—and it has to do with what Mr. Levitt brought up—is precisely the ability to do your job and to effectively capture an item, a good, or a person that would otherwise get out or get in, particularly in the area of dual-use equipment. Just walk me through—I have a very simplistic approach to this—the difference between a washing machine and a centrifuge that might end up, depending on how it's used, being used for cleaning clothes or for refining something.

[Andrew LeFrank]

In fairness, I like to keep it simple as well. I leave it up to the technical experts when we get down to the precision of what we're dealing with.

It's not necessarily obvious when an officer goes out to determine whether a good has a dual-use technology, but that officer is supported by individuals in our headquarters office and in our counterproliferation operations section. They have tremendous training and experience, and those individuals make the referral based on what they believe are potential risks based on something like a dual-use type of technology. When officers from there go out to do their examination, they will perhaps take photos of those items and provide the photos. Then we'll confer with experts in CSIS and in defence, in order to determine whether a good, which on the surface appears to be no different from something you're using in your home, has an application, perhaps, in a nuclear capacity.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Thank you.

My understanding is that a lack of resources is really the biggest impediment to you being able to do your job, and I think you said that was also what the 2016 audit showed. Is there anything else that poses an impediment from an operational perspective?

[Andrew LeFrank]

There are challenges—and I think they were alluded to by my colleague from the RCMP—with respect to the conversion of intelligence to evidence. That does pose a particular problem when you're dealing with sensitive sources. You otherwise might have to find ways to utilize that and act on that information to prevent those goods from going. That's probably the largest impediment I see, and in many ways, is the difference between doing a civil and regulatory action to seize goods or require that the goods be taken back and not exported and pursuing with a criminal investigation, which requires a lot more effort and is a lot more complicated since you have to gather the evidence to prove that you have a criminal offence.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

All right. I guess, from your perspective, your job is done once you've stopped whatever it is from going in or coming out, but I guess you're saying is there's frustration with then not seeing anything happen.

[Andrew LeFrank]

Our primary responsibility is to interdict or prevent the goods from leaving, but there are also secondary and tertiary issues, in either working with the RCMP or conducting our own criminal investigation to prevent the organization from going again. There's also a concern with the goods themselves, and whether you allow those goods to go back to the exporter or you want to seize those so that they can't be diverted or sent somewhere else when they try again.

[Marc Miller, Liberal, Ville-Marie—Le Sud-Ouest—Île-des-Soeurs, QC]

Okay, thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

Thank you.

Mr. Kmiec, go ahead, please.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Thank you all for coming.

I've gone over the notes here, and I've been listening to this conversation so far, so I'm going to start my questions with admissibility of persons.

Mr. LeFrank, in your speaking notes you say that a person can be rendered inadmissible for a variety of reasons, and you list all the reasons they could be excluded. When a person person tries to enter the country, what type of information is the officer seeing on the screen to make that determination of whether to do a secondary screening or ask more questions? What do they see that would tell them that this person should not enter the country? What's on there?

[Lesley Soper]

There are a number of tools that officers would use. If that individual had already been through a visa screening process overseas, that full visa file would be available to the officer at the port of entry for consultation, if needed, for an understanding of the decision-making. If it's an impromptu arrival at the port of entry, we would have already looked at the individual through an advanced passenger targeting process. If that individual was coming in by air, we would have cross-referenced any index or any indicator that would have been flagged against that individual, either through a lookout or through a target set against that individual if they were a known risk to Canada.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

How are those indexes created? How's that information compiled?

[Lesley Soper]

That can come from a number of sources. Typically, it comes through research into open source information about individuals: criminal history, organized criminal history....

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

They don't google at their desks, though, I hope. They're not just googling their names? They have access to actual—

[Lesley Soper]

No. We have a number of officers who are working in various countries and who are quite aware of some of the issues that might arise. We certainly come into contact with those individuals through—

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

How often is that information updated?

[Lesley Soper]

It is updated as often as it needs to be updated in order to be accurate and available to officers to make decisions in real time.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Okay.

How closely do you work with CSIS or with military intelligence services to update what officers are getting to see on their screens to make a determination of whether someone should come in? I ask because in the case that my colleague brought up, that of Mr. Malkin, there were 21 lines of secret information in his immigration file that a Federal Court of Canada judge ruled were too sensitive to reveal then. Obviously, if an immigration officer is making the determination of whether or not to let someone into the country, that's the type of information they would likely need to know right away before they allow the person to enter the country and to then be able to use our system to appeal endlessly in order to stay here. That's why I ask this question. Where's this information coming from? How sensitive is it? From that moment of collection to the moment it is used, is that intelligence available to our officers so they can make the best determination possible?

[Lesley Soper]

Yes, it is, but if they had questions about the nature of the file in order to make an admissibility decision at the border, they also have access to our officers, who are specialists in security screening. We may place a lookout in the system if we know the individual and we have a specific history on that individual. We have shared information systems between IRCC and CBSA, so our officers have access in a secondary examination to look at an individual's full immigration case file.

There are a number of tools available to officers that will help them make decisions around access to Canada.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Mr. LeFrank.

[Andrew LeFrank]

On the intelligence front, I'll just let you know that, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we have intelligence professionals who are working with partners. We generally break up our intelligence into three levels: strategic, operational, and tactical. On the tactical side, whenever we have information of an exigent circumstance that has anything to do with the national security of Canadians, that information is uploaded and provided to appropriate end-users in an extremely expeditious fashion.

We work very closely with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the RCMP to make sure that information that is required by our front-line officers or any decision-makers, including our counterparts at IRCC overseas and at Global Affairs Canada, is made available to them as soon as possible.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Okay. How much time do I have, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bob Nault]

You have another minute.