Thank you.
Concerning the comment about faulty information—I think I somewhat touched on this in my opening statement—we need to have some sort of mechanism, and it may be outside the bounds of this study, whereby we can verify our own information. In anything in life, it would be not prudent to take just one source and assume that it should be “the source”. You have crossing vectors and nexuses that create a sounder picture. This comes back to the question of sound information.
Again, this may be outside the purview of this particular study, but reviewing things, for example, such as how the RCMP can manage things under the Security Offences Act, because they are the lead agency for national security, or how CSIS, under sections 12 through 17, or it might be section 18...how they collect information and what they do....
It goes back to what I was talking to Ms. Freeman about. We need to break down these institutional silos. We can't rely just on one picture; we can't rely just on one statement. With our membership in the Five Eyes, we need to be able to do something from a Canadian perspective that allows us to further this information sharing. Otherwise, every other country has its own interests—I say this respectfully of my colleague, whom I admire very much—as Canada has its own interests, and unless we can take this from a Canadian vantage point, we risk being handed information that is not necessarily in our own best interests. It may be—you would like to believe that your partners and allies are looking out for you—but at the end of the day, everyone is going to be looking out for their own interests.
I will only comment on a very quick case, as an example that is in open source, even though it wasn't detailed—it came out of the U.K.—in which the U.S. was afraid to share information about a Mumbai-style attack happening inside the U.K. for fear that their own U.S.-interest sources might be compromised in the process.
We have our departmental institutional silos and then we have our international silos. We need to be more comfortable working together, keeping in mind that if we want the best decisions for Canada, they need to be taken from a Canadian vantage point, with a Canadian verification and a Canadian assurance.