Just to be clear, in the positions that I have been in I have never been in intelligence collection or in the custodial role. I've always been a consumer. I'm not necessarily the best authority on this. It's a question that would be much better addressed to David Vigneault or Caroline Xavier at CSE.
Having said that, in general terms, what happens is that if we somehow see that it is in the public's interest to.... When we say “declassify”, that doesn't mean we're going to go and give you the document. That just means that we're going to make a decision that, for some of that information that is classified, we're going to render that public, because we think it's in the public's interest to do so. It's like what was done in 2014 in the context of the attack on the National Research Council and in the context of the attribution that I spoke about in my remarks.
Our system is very different. Those decisions don't usually come from the political side. There usually will be conversations where the officials will provide advice on what would be in the public's interest and what the pros and cons would be. They have their own process to do this.
As I said, it's been done. It's never “here's the piece of intelligence; read it,” but in that piece of intelligence, for that element, we render that public, because we want the public to know. That's why we're taking these actions.
An example is in the context of the Skripal.... In March 2018, we joined many other countries in attributing this to Russia. We PNG'd four Russians. In the press communication, the Prime Minister explained that these people had been involved in foreign interference activities on Canadian soil.