Thank you, Madame Gaudreau.
First of all, as Mr. Ruff will appreciate, NSICOP chooses its own subjects for review. Of course, in any particular year of its operations, it can't cover the waterfront, but it can and has chosen important topics for study. I hope it will continue to do so.
My main pitch to the committee is: Please do not undermine this creation that took so long to put in place and is, I think, an important institution and one where, frankly, Canada is trying to catch up with our counterparts among the Five Eyes in having an ability on the part of a parliamentary committee, a committee of parliamentarians—frankly, I don't think there's a big difference between those things—in being able to have access to classified information and conduct thorough and in-depth studies with the help of an expert secretariat of a kind that no parliamentary committee has or has the resources for.
I think that it is an important institution, and my real fear about this bill is not its usefulness or uselessness; it is the undermining of the very important thing that we created in 2017 that is still maturing but deserves to survive, and it certainly deserves a timely parliamentary review.