Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome, Minister. You no doubt will be aware that I forwarded to your office a series of nine questions that I had hoped you could provide written answers to prior to this committee. I wasn't actually overly enamoured with the response I got back from your office. I'll quote it. It said, “It is preferable that Mr. Easter pose these questions to the minister and officials on Monday to allow the responses to be on the record and have all members of the committee be able to hear the responses to these specific questions.”
Anyway, Mr. Minister, I do have those questions in both official languages here and, Mr. Chairman, I'd ask the clerk to distribute them. I may or may not get into them, but I would request, because they are quite technical, that your office provide the committee with answers prior to us going to clause by clause, because it is asking for some technical responses in terms of the bill. Before I get to the specific bill, but on something related, when you last appeared before us on October 8 you said, “We know of about 80 who have returned to Canada”, meaning terrorists who operated abroad, or Canadians who operated in terrorist entities abroad. This is your quote: “Let me be clear that these individuals posing a threat to our security at home have violated Canadian law, as passed by this Parliament in the Combating Terrorism Act.”
This is my question to you. None of these people have been arrested yet as I understand it, although you said they violated the Canadian law. I have said to you in the House that I believe they should be able to be arrested under section 83.181. I'll not get into it. There are four different evaluations there. Can you answer? One, why hasn't section 83.181 of the Criminal Code been used to arrest those individuals? Two, are there components in this bill that will allow you to arrest those individuals where you're not now able to?