It's a tough one. I cover this a little bit in my book, if you don't mind the plug for that.
The problem, if you go at the very top, if you're the Prime Minister of Canada, the chief of staff to the Prime Minister or the Clerk of the Privy Council, is that you are at the end of a funnel of so many issues running in parallel. Your job is constant multi-tasking. You cannot read everything. You can't meet everybody. You can't see everybody. There are choices about time management and choices about what gets sent to the Prime Minister, what the Prime Minister has time to read—the several roles a prime minister plays and so on. That's an accountability of the clerk and the public service side, and it's an accountability of the chief of staff on the political side.
You will not be able to just apply some rule book or algorithm that will sort it for you and get it right every time. There will be lapses of judgment because you cannot see in advance that this thing turned out to be as important as it did, and you may be sending stuff that turns out to be trivial and unimportant.
The point about intelligence services is that they're constantly exercising judgment about information. I think I heard the tail end of that conversation. What's reliable? What's important? There are 200 countries in the world. Are we going to follow every single one of them in detail? No, there are some that are more important than others.
That's why people get these jobs of national security adviser or clerk or chief of staff to the Prime Minister: to exercise those kinds of judgments and put processes in place that reduce the risk of gaps in error. We have learned from this exercise that there are gaps that need to be addressed.