Structurally at SIRC, ideal membership is five. Even when they are at five, they're part-time, and it's an enormous undertaking for a review of CSIS if you are full-time let alone part-time. They've been at three for some time. As you know, two chairs have resigned in controversy, and as a consequence the continuity of leadership has been uneven at SIRC.
Resource-wise, you can map the growth in operational funds of CSIS. SIRC's operational funds have also increased but not proportionately. And so what was always an auditing function.... SIRC when it reviews CSIS doesn't look at everything CSIS has been doing, it is piecemeal. And presumably, because its scale is now diminished relative to the scale of CSIS operations, it's even more piecemeal than it has been in the past.
It's a question of staffing it seriously and earnestly, of making the members full-time appointees and resourcing those members properly. Legislatively, it means reacting to the Arar inquiry's very important recommendations that there be the capacity for the three review bodies we have in essence to coordinate their review functions, so that they can actually follow investigations across institutional boundaries.
There was some reporting from The Globe and Mail earlier this past year suggesting that an informal effort was made by the commissioner of the CSE in one of his reviews to coordinate with SIRC, and the government response was to challenge the legal competency of the commissioner to do so. In fact, as I understand it, there was some threat that the commissioner might be in violation of his and his staff's secrecy and security obligations by coordinating. That requires a legislative fix and it's a long time in coming.