Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association wants to thank the committee for inviting us.
I will begin my remarks in French and will then continue in English.
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that was founded in 1964 to protect civil rights and freedoms in Canada. It provides education, representation and intervention programs to decision-making bodies like this one and to courts. It mainly works with volunteers and lawyers across Canada.
My comments will focus on three issues that were raised in response to your report.
I would like to begin by discussing the need to set up an independent accountability regime for the Canada Border Services Agency. I will then talk about the thorny and divisive issue that is the treatment of individuals suspected to have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity. In conclusion, I will quickly go over certain aspects of the security clearance regime.
I want to begin by specifying that the association is always interested in the protection of procedural justice standards with a view to ensuring that people are treated fairly across Canada. The Border Services Agency is being given more and more constraining powers. However, the agency's supervision system is something of an anomaly in Canada. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have an oversight regime. Of course, I want to highlight the efforts being invested by the government—and this issue has been considered by the House—to improve the RCMP's oversight regime. However, the Border Services Agency has no such regime in place. There is an internal complaint process, but that is insufficient in a context where increasingly constraining powers are being used.
In a democracy, increased powers or discretion should automatically be paired with a certain monitoring oversight. It is important to see that as part of the effort to increase the confidence of Canadians in the border regime.
I'll come back later with examples to show how necessary this might be, but in short, there is a gap in our accountability framework. CSIS has independent supervision, and the RCMP will have an even better one, but CBSA does not. Many people call us; we have encouraged them to use the internal mechanism for complaints, and it has not been satisfactory.
In our view it would just be part of the regime of increasing powers at the border to ensure that indeed there is some accountability framework. We are not asking for oversight because we suspect foul play or bad form; it's just the right thing to do in a democracy. It's just good governance.
In our view it's not necessary to create a new agency—it wouldn't be very popular to talk about that now—but we might be able to enlarge the mandate of some of the current agencies. I urge you to reflect on this as you move forward in your recommendations.
Secondly, there is the difficult issue of persons suspected of war crimes or crimes against humanity. CCLA, like other human rights organizations, is fully engaged in the fight against impunity. It's absolutely essential that people who may have committed crimes of war or crimes against humanity be brought to justice and tried properly. Similarly, people who are innocent of such crimes should be vindicated and should be cleared.
The obligations of Canada on this score are important, and I urge the committee to engage as parliamentarians and to ask for more information on this context. That will be my pitch to you. I think what CCLA recommends is that we should have a policy to extradite or prosecute people suspected of crime, not simply to deport them. I think that simply deporting them is like passing the buck. It's not owning up to our responsibilities to ensure that crimes against humanity are fully prosecuted.
We certainly want an immigration regime that's good for Canada, and it also has to be good for the world. Every day Canadians around the globe are subject to injustices at the hands of dictatorships, and it's incumbent upon us to make sure that war crimes or crimes against humanity are fully prosecuted.
CCLA will be intervening in the Ezokola case. I know that Mr. Waldman will be there as well. This hopefully will clarify some of the standards of proof that are necessary to exclude someone from the protection of being a refugee because he or she is suspected of war crimes or crimes against humanity. I would urge you to continue to consider the necessity to ensure that there is some fundamental justice in the way in which these decisions are made.
It's a difficult question. There's no doubt that different cases raise different facts. Not everyone can be extradited, because there are places where they won't be tried fairly and places where they would be tortured or suffer persecution, but prosecution should be our duty here. I urge you as parliamentarians to demand reporting mechanisms from the ministry to ensure that the decision not to prosecute or not to extradite and instead to deport is reached only as a last resort and only in the clearest of cases.
In our view there's a lack of transparency here that you may want to explore further in your report. We owe it to the world to carry this responsibility forcefully.
Finally, I'll talk about security clearances and norms of procedural fairness generally.
CCLA has a long tradition of ensuring that. We need to treat people fairly in Canada. That's what we're all about, and we have to continue to do that. I think it's important that we have similar norms of justice no matter who it is that is being treated in Canada. Any time there is a depletion of the justice requirement, I think we should be worried. We should insist that norms of fundamental justice continue to be maintained throughout the system. I urge you to put that as a principle of your recommendations.
Last week we issued a report on police checks. Essentially it was about the way in which many people who are found not guilty have information about withdrawn charges or even the verdict of not guilty being disclosed in the context of police checks for employment in vulnerable sectors and so on. It has prompted lots of calls throughout Canada. We've had many calls. I raise it here because many of the calls were about security clearance. I thought I would share with you some of the stories and the issues that have come up.
Basically, we have come to the conclusion that the security clearance regime must be reviewed. We suggest that the Privacy Commissioner or another organization be given the mandate to carry out that review, so as to ensure that the information management process is adequate and that there are sufficient processes for correcting information.
People are sometimes victims of poor information management, in a way. However, that seriously affects their ability to work and travel. We think that the correction processes, retention practices and procedural justice standards involved in the security clearance regime must be strengthened and made more transparent for Canadians and those living in Canada.
We've had several calls, then, about the way in which.... From the consultations we did with the police sector and the security sector, in my view the issue is not so much a question of polarized debate. It's more a question that clarity is needed. There is some ambiguity in the law, and I think it needs to be clarified. Everybody would be better off if they knew better what their obligations were in terms of privacy—