I thank the member for raising all these issues.
I think spring cleaning is always a good idea. I think it helps us update things.
I too worry about the threat to our institutions, both from foreign interference but also from lack of comprehensive understanding of the nature of the threat. In that sense, I would point to the fact that a ministerial direction has been issued on May 16. That makes it very clear that the Prime Minister, through the Minister of Public Safety, wishes to be informed rapidly should there be any information or potential threats to members of Parliament.
On top of that, as has been stated by other witnesses before your committee, the government is, I believe, considering legislative changes to some of the key legal frameworks that govern this space. There's a project afoot—I think it's well known—to create an agent registry. There are potential changes to other laws as well.
I think you can look forward and, indeed, Canadians can look forward, to an updating of the cadres or frameworks that govern this area. In addition to that, as Jody Thomas said when she was before you, within the public service we are creating or tweaking some governance mechanisms and some information-sharing mechanisms to try to ensure that we can do the very best we can in terms of providing relevant information to the government.
The final point that I would make, and I'm happy to expand on it later...I do have a sort of varied background, as you indicated or as the member indicated. I'm not a career public servant. I've seen how other organizations work outside of Canada. What I would say is that I think we have a national security set-up that was optimized for terrorism. We had this period in Canada between 1989 and, say, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, where, after 9/11, the primary threat was deemed to come from terrorists. I'm not certain that's any longer the case.
We have geopolitical tensions. We have foreign interference. We have what the Indo-Pacific strategy calls—I might not get the wording right—an increasingly assertive China. The world has changed, and our set-up needs to be able to adapt to that.