Thank you, Mr. Chair, honourable members of the committee, and honourable Mr. Auditor General of Canada.
I would like to thank the members of the committee for giving Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada the opportunity to provide an update on the department's action plan following the Auditor General's fall report.
I'm happy to report that much progress has been accomplished since the publication of the report and that our two institutions, the RCMP and Foreign Affairs, are working in a spirit of collaboration and transparency to meet the Canadian public's interest.
Today, more and more Canadians explore remote corners of the world, work for foreign-based companies, participate in student exchanges and retire in southern destinations. While most international trips are trouble-free, the Government of Canada is there to provide consular assistance should a Canadian find himself or herself in trouble.
Canada has a team of dedicated consular officials who assist thousands of Canadians abroad each year when a Canadian citizen requests consular assistance. The role of consular officials is to ensure the well-being of a Canadian in distress abroad and to ensure that they are being treated fairly and in accordance with local laws. We provide consular assistance 24 hours a day, seven days a week, through our Emergency Watch and Response Centre and more than 260 points of service in 150 countries.
Parallel to all of this mobility by Canadians is the increasingly transnational nature of crime, as has already been mentioned. Foreign Affairs is pleased to work with the RCMP as part of the Government of Canada's commitment to protecting Canadians from crimes and criminals that cross our borders. As notified by the Auditor General, information sharing with the RCMP regarding Canadians arrested, charged, and convicted of serious crimes abroad is subject to limitations. Specifically, limitations are prescribed in the Privacy Act on the sharing of information about individuals and in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on the sharing of information about Canadians with law enforcement agencies. That said, our department shares relevant information with the RCMP in accordance with Canadian privacy laws, and remains committed to doing so when it is in the public interest.
Our management action plan outlines initiatives that are currently under way to improve information-sharing practices between Foreign Affairs and the RCMP, capitalizing on existing mechanisms such as the presence of an RCMP liaison officer within Foreign Affairs. In September 2014, Foreign Affairs and the RCMP agreed to set up a consular policy dialogue among senior officials to discuss a number of priorities of interest about institutions, including information sharing. The members of this dialogue met for the first time in October, and will continue to meet on a quarterly basis. As a direct result of that initial meeting in October, we formed a joint working group to discuss information-sharing processes in more detail. This working group has already met on several occasions and has been able to address some of the RCMP's concerns on the way information that may be available to Foreign Affairs can be shared. Because we wanted it to be solution driven, we involved consular, legal, and privacy experts from both institutions. The working group is reviewing the legal framework under which our institutions can share information and is exploring new avenues to share information. It has also reviewed the current mechanisms and identified some quick fixes that will yield significant improvement in the way requests are handled, particularly improving timeliness of response.
To address specifically the concerns raised by the Auditor General, the consular operations bureau created the travelling child sex offender information-sharing committee. This is an internal committee that reviews the information that Foreign Affairs has about consular clients who are convicted of sexual crimes against minors. The work of this committee has created a sound mechanism to review and determine whether existing and new information held by Foreign Affairs could be lawfully shared in light of the Protecting Victims from Sex Offenders Act. This act came into force in 2011 and stipulates that the names of those Canadians who are convicted of sex offences abroad and who are returning to Canada may be included in the national sex offender registry. In support of these initiatives, we're also taking this opportunity to review our publications and training for consular staff to have a common understanding of what we may lawfully share with the RCMP and how we do it.
Protecting Canadians from criminals who commit crimes outside Canadian borders remains a key commitment of the Government of Canada. Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada will continue to work with the RCMP to improve lawful information-sharing practices between our two institutions to the benefit of the Canadian public.
Thank you.