Thank you, Mr. Chair.
And thank you very much to the witnesses.
Ms. Pollak, I'll start where you finished off, which is stating that it's now up to the government to act on Justice O'Connor's recommendations. It's staggering that we have to say that. It was 2006 when Justice O'Connor made his recommendations. At that time this committee was seized with the issue of Maher Arar. It was a flashpoint for a series of concerns of legislative inadequacies that allowed that situation, and perhaps others, to emerge.
And if Justice O'Connor's recommendations weren't enough, let alone the deficiencies that were identified before, we had recommendations that essentially were echoed by David Brown in his examination of the RCMP pension scandal. There was a special Senate committee on anti-terrorism that echoed the same recommendations. In fact, Mr. Kennedy, you've consistently made the same recommendations, and you've talked about the need to extend the legislative authority.
The only response we had from the government was from former Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day, who said that the government would be proposing a new oversight system. But we've never seen anything.
We're in a situation where these legislative deficiencies, which really captured the entire nation's attention.... We were told when Justice O'Connor made his recommendation that they would all be immediately implemented. We're still talking about what the government response is going to be.
My question, first, is to Mr. Kennedy. Would it be fair to say that the same legislative deficiencies that existed prior to Justice O'Connor's recommendations exist today?