The Belgian model came out of a catastrophic failure in the Dutroux case. I would suggest that one of the reasons we would want to look at accountability is precisely to avoid any risk of such catastrophic failure of a security system. I won't go into all the details, but I would be happy to provide the committee with the contact information of the senior judge who heads the organization in Belgium, who I know quite well. The key about the organization of Belgium is that the accountability is provided through a mechanism that is paid for by Parliament, and the mechanism is directly accountable to Parliament and not to the political executive. It has a staff of about 100 people. The key element of their accountability capacity is that they do not provide accountability just for files that are closed, but they have the ability to see files of any active investigation that is being carried out within the Belgian security framework. So it doesn't just provide accountability after the fact; it provides accountability in the actual process of investigations.
The challenge, I think, that we currently have in Canada is that we have annual reviews and after-the-fact accountability, but we don't have a mechanism that provides ongoing accountability in as effective a manner as we could have. We have a mechanism that reports to the political executive rather than being accountable to Parliament. The major change that would require is for members of Parliament to be security-cleared to have privileged access to the information they are being provided, and this would be a significant step for Canadian Parliament to take.