Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I have just two quick comments to begin. First of all, I'm a big fan of private members' bills and have contributed to two of them in the past, both on oversight issues. Like Mr. Ruff, I have also held secret, top secret, top secret code word clearance, and I would say in that regard that security clearances are not a holy grail to understanding national security intelligence issues and threats.
Bill C-377 would establish an unprecedented power for Canadian parliamentarians, on their own initiative, to apply for a secret security clearance in order to access classified information. This power has no equivalent among the parliamentarians of our Five Eyes partners—those that are Westminster-style democracies. The parliaments of the U.K., Australia and New Zealand all share a responsibility with that of Canada to hold the government to account as a core duty. In their cases, this responsibility, when it comes to matters pertaining to national security and intelligence that involve access to classified intelligence briefings and records, is given to special committees of review and oversight. In the U.K. case it is the Intelligence and Security Committee, in Australia it's the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, and in New Zealand it's the Intelligence and Security Committee. All of these have unique features, but in the case of New Zealand the committee includes the prime minister and the leader of the opposition.
In Canada the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians is the body, established by Parliament in 2017, to undertake reviews of national security and intelligence issues. NSICOP has significant access to classified material, with some restrictions: cabinet confidences, ongoing investigations that may lead to criminal prosecutions and solicitor-client privilege, as examples. Its members must obtain top secret security clearances and relinquish the protection of parliamentary privilege should they divulge, in an unauthorized manner, classified information. NSICOP has been publishing reports for the past six years, most recently its report on foreign interference. It has, in my view, performed an important public service and issued many significant studies. I encourage all members of this committee to support NSICOP and to pay attention to its studies: Use them to hold the government to account.
NSICOP is not mentioned in Bill C-377. The effort to establish NSICOP took many years to accomplish—decades, in fact—and to undermine it now, which I think this bill would do, would be a serious mistake. The legislation was opposed by the Conservative Party at the time of its passage, but an earlier iteration dating back to a study undertaken in 2004 actually had all-party backing.
Members of Parliament may feel that there are aspects of the original legislation that established NSICOP that need review and amendment. You would not be alone in this. In the original statute, at section 34, the legislation called for a comprehensive review of the act by Parliament after five years. That review should have begun in 2022. It has not yet started, which is a serious failure of a statutory obligation and a missed opportunity by Parliament.
I believe Bill C-377 is wholly unnecessary, given the existence of NSICOP as the parliamentary entity designed to exercise accountability, in a non-partisan matter, on behalf of both the House of Commons and Senate. Even if you do not share that view, I point out the following—and there has been, of course, some discussion in the previous hour about that. In my reading, Bill C-377 does not establish any real need-to-know principle, leaving this to individual parliamentarians' discretion. Application for a secret clearance is not restricted to members of committees dealing with national security and intelligence issues. Even if it were, it would result in clear duplication with NSICOP and undermine, I believe, the purpose of NSICOP. Bill C-377 would open up security clearance processes for all parliamentarians in a way that I think is hard to justify and extremely problematic. It would have impacts on security clearance processes conducted by CSIS, potentially undermining their rigour, and leaves unanswered—as we discovered in your first hour of discussion—the question of what would happen should an applicant be denied a clearance. In my view, Bill C-377 would fatally undermine NSICOP and parliamentarians' ability to hold the government to account on important matters of national security and intelligence, and it demonstrates no real need...case. It would also heighten, potentially, the risk of unauthorized disclosure of classified information. A better alternative would be to have a system—and I stress “system”—in place whereby party leaders have clearances and can receive classified information, as NSICOP itself suggested.
Finally, I encourage parliamentarians to push, instead, in a different direction on a genuine declassification strategy, which I think would be a great benefit to all parliamentarians and members of the Canadian public, in terms of better informing Canadians about national security issues.
Thank you.