Mr. Chair, I think those are excellent observations, and I have perhaps two comments to offer.
First of all, one of the changes that was made to section 19 of the CSIS Act as part of Bill C-70 really removed what essentially was a prohibition from CSIS sharing any information or analysis outside the federal government, including unclassified information. Those amendments enable us to also provide a lot more unclassified information, advice and expertise in a way that we couldn't before.
That's enabling us, for example, to participate with allies in multibranded security advisories in a way that perhaps we couldn't before. It's also to enable sharing unclassified information that we previously couldn't provide. As the member mentioned, this gives us a great opportunity to have a far more sophisticated national security conversation.
Now, in some particular cases there will be specific pieces of information that are classified that we would like to be able to share outside the federal government to those who have the appropriate clearance. For example, there could be a situation where a parliamentarian is representing a particular constituency where we know a foreign interference actor might be interested, given the natural resources in the area or a particular ethnic or minority community that makes up the riding.
What we would like to be able to do is provide that specific and perhaps classified information to the parliamentarian to enable the parliamentarian to build their resiliency by being able to recognize and then, as a result of that, manage the threat.
That's the purpose of the changes to the CSIS Act. It is to allow us to do those resiliency disclosures.
Sometimes it will be unclassified information. Sometimes it would be classified, but classified information would be provided to only those who do have the requisite clearance.
In each of those cases there would need to be a determination by the owner of the information as to whether there was a specific need to know for that particular specific piece of information.