Thank you for the question, Madam Chair. I would say it's an excellent one.
I think we need to pay more attention to that, particularly on the side of trying to provide opportunities for MPs, especially newly elected MPs coming into the strange world, perhaps, of the House of Commons or even the Senate with some degree of formal education, where they were perhaps unlikely to have ever come across the nature of national security threats and intelligence responses to them. I would extend that beyond MPs and senators to include their staff, who, as you know better than I do, play an important role in providing advice to MPs. I think there is a lot of educational work that can be done there.
I also think it's the case that MPs, senators and their staff need access to more readable and publicly available information relevant to Canada on national security and intelligence. That is one huge argument for a national security strategy. National security strategies exist among many of our Five Eyes partners, and they do a number of things. Principally, they spell out the understood range of national security threats a country faces. Second, they talk about responses to those threats, in terms of both the response capability of government and how those responses fit into a democratic framework for a society engaging with these threats. It can be a very vital public education tool, including for MPs and staff, but it also serves as a road map for the government itself, which is, in the national security intelligence realm, decentralized and siloed. It could use, frankly, some marching orders.
I would remind members of this committee about some of the testimony the national security and intelligence adviser, Jody Thomas, gave to the Public Order Emergency Commission, where she referenced the fact that she found it difficult to pull together a government response from her level because of the absence of a framework or national security strategy. If we're looking for an example to make this something more than just a nice ask, I think it was demonstrated, frankly, during the government's efforts to respond to the “freedom convoy”.
Thank you.