I'm going to need more than two and a half minutes, so I guess I'll continue with this the next time.
But I want to talk about decision-making processes a little and what kinds of mistakes can be made. In the business world, there's a book called Getting to Yes. The suggestion is that in a negotiation, yes is the desirable answer, and no, meaning no negotiated settlement, is not what you want.
In a criminal court, we want to get to the correct answer, whether it's guilty or not guilty, recognizing that there are two kinds of mistakes that can be made. You can either find a guilty person innocent, or you could find an innocent person guilty. I think our system is set up in such a way as to avoid the latter, recognizing that we may actually err on the side of freeing guilty people so that we don't incarcerate people who are innocent.
In our immigration system, the appeals are set up to get to yes, I would argue--in a normal immigration system or for refugees--because we recognize that the appeals are there to get a yes answer. When someone is admitted to Canada, the government doesn't appeal it to try to block the refugee or immigration status. I think that's based on the notion that what we don't want to do is make an incorrect decision where we deny a refugee or immigrant claim, because the consequences of that could be more dire than letting someone in who perhaps technically doesn't meet the test if it was perfectly applied.
I've raised that because in the case of security certificates, there's obviously a serious mistake than can be made on either side. If you issue one and detain someone who should not be detained, obviously there's a serious violation of that individual's rights. On the other hand, if we admit someone to Canada who actually is a security threat and we don't stop them, that could pose a very serious security threat to public safety in Canada. I think that's the difficulty of the situation you're in. There's no kind of easy side to err on here. Errors on both sides potentially have serious consequences.
My specific question is this. When someone is detained and when the court upholds that they are a security threat to Canada, we're saying we wouldn't put them out of the country if they were going back somewhere where potentially they could be subject to torture—