Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I must say I agree with most of what the witnesses said this morning and again this afternoon. It's a great pleasure to have you here, because you are confirming the doubts we have about the charter soundness of this bill. I agree with the detail of your work a great deal.
But I must say I'm surprised the Canadian Bar Association, sprinkled through its work, talks about “evidence”, when this is really an administrative process not attached to the Criminal Code and not requiring the standards of evidence required by the Canada Evidence Act.
We heard this morning the pseudo evidence presented is often a series of narrative reports written by different people and summarized later, or one could say cherry-picked, with parts deleted by another writer. So it's almost as if a series of writers put this together. Let's say an agent in Damascus writes something about a person and that's passed on and then an agent in Paris writes something else and then an agent in Saudi Arabia writes something else, etc. It was described to us as a series of reports.
So it would seem to me that rather than using the word “evidence”, which gives credence to the process, which makes Canadians believe there's something meaty there when maybe there isn't, we might be better to use words like “the narrative about this person”, or “the reportage about this person”, or something like that, because the word “evidence” has connotations in Canada.
Would you agree with me, Ms. Dongier?