Public Safety Committee on March 23rd, 2015

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Okay, colleagues, welcome to meeting number 56 of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. Of course today we are following up on our study of Bill C-51.

We are starting a little late. We certainly apologize to the witnesses who have come here today, but we are held hostage by the timing of Parliament, votes, and so on. It is the intention of the chair to spend the full two hours with our witnesses here today. Should there be anything different, the chair would certainly like to know it. Otherwise, we will go from now until—

Excuse me, yes, Madam Doré Lefebvre.

[Rosane Doré Lefebvre, NDP, Alfred-Pellan, QC]

Mr. Chair, I would like to ask the committee for unanimous consent to adopt the following motion:

That the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security add one hour to its study of Bill C-51 and invite to appear the Quebec Minister of Public Security, Lise Thériault, the Quebec Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Stéphanie Vallée, and the Minister responsible for Canadian Intergovernmental Affairs and the Canadian Francophonie, Jean-Marc Fournier.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Unanimous consent is required to present the motion.

Is there unanimous consent of the committee?

[An hon. member]

No.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

There's not.

As I was saying, we will go from now until 8:55 p.m.

We will start with our first round of`witnesses. Today we have, as an individual, Mr. Salim Mansur. Welcome, sir. From Protect Our Privacy Coalition, we have Mr. Stephen Anderson, executive director of OpenMedia. We also welcome Ms. Sukanya Pillay, executive director and general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. We have Ms. Connie Fournier, founder of Free Dominion. Thank you all very kindly for coming here today. We also have, as an individual, Mr. Garth Davies, associate professor at Simon Fraser University.

We will start off with up to 10 minutes for up to three of our witness panels. At the invitation of this committee, you can separate your time as you wish, but of course, the chair will follow the standard operating rules of this committee.

Mr. Mansur, you have the floor, sir.

[Dr. Salim Mansur, As an Individual]

Mr. Chairman, I want to begin by thanking you and the members of the committee for this invitation to provide you as an independent expert my views on Bill C-51. I will express these from the perspectives of political philosophy and history, and from that of a lifelong devotion as a Muslim to the study of Islam, Muslim history and society, and comparative religion. I want to stress this point since criticisms of Bill C-51 are unhelpful when abstract notions of freedom and their impairment are discussed narrowly or exclusively from a legalistic point of view with insufficient attention to the contemporary reality in our world.

The preamble of Bill C-51 states the purpose of this proposed anti-terrorism legislation. There is the need to equip Canada to deal adequately and effectively in terms of security threats from violent Islamist jihadists that loom larger and larger in our post-9/11 world, and that Canada is not insulated from this threat-filled reality.

The third paragraph of the preamble in Bill C-51 reads, “there is no more fundamental role for a government than protecting its country and its people”. This is a succinct statement of what has been amply discussed in classical liberal political philosophy from Hobbes and Locke to Raymond Aron and Hans Morgenthau.

From the perspective of classical liberalism, it is understood that the freedom we enjoy in a society such as ours is the fruit of security, or that there can be no freedom in the absence of weakness in security. This relationship between security and freedom was expressed by the founding fathers of the United States in terms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the same was expressed by Canada’s founding fathers in terms of peace, order, and good government. The central concern of liberal democratic order is in keeping the balance right between security and freedom.

The authors of Bill C-51 are cognizant of this naturally given tension between security and freedom. They acknowledge that measures such as sharing of information within government of activities that undermine Canadian security are to be consistent with requirements of the Canadian charter. Bill C-51 in my reading is not designed to turn Canada into some version of Hobbes’ Leviathan or Orwell’s 1984, despite at times the fevered imagination of its critics.

Bill C-51 is directed against Islamist jihadists and to prevent or pre-empt them from their stated goal to carry out terrorist threats against the west, including Canada. The threats are real, not hypothetical, and they have multiplied ever since 9/11 brought Islamic terrorism into North America.

The most recent worldwide threat assessment of the U.S. intelligence community presented by James Clapper, director of U.S. national intelligence, informs us of the growth of multiple threats to our security, and the most ominous is that of violence emanating out of the Middle East following the rise of ISIS in the midst of the Syrian conflict that erupted in 2011. This U.S. intelligence report states, “Since the conflict began in 2011, more than 20,000 foreign fighters—at least 3,400 of whom are Westerners—have gone to Syria from more than 90 countries”. According to Canadian government sources, in 2014 there were some 130 individuals with Canadian connections who were abroad and who were suspected of terrorism-related activities. These numbers have likely increased during the past 12 months.

In terms of the debate on Bill C-51, some 130 individuals with Canadian connections involved in jihad-related terrorism might not seem much to justify the measures being proposed. In my view, however, these numbers are going to grow as the situation in the Middle East and the surrounding region worsens, as the IS, or Islamic State, expands its control of territories in the Levant and attracts more Muslims from the west to assist in building the newly declared caliphate.

As the number of jihadists increases, so will the threats of violent terrorism, and the likelihood that despite the best efforts of our security intelligence agencies, the jihadists will succeed in striking us, as in the case of the bombing at the Boston Marathon in April 2013, or the massacre at Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015.

We are at war, a war dramatically and radically different from past wars, and this war was declared against the liberal democratic west by Islamists well before 9/11.

The reason that the United States was taken by surprise on 9/11, as were subsequently Spain, Britain, and France, and as we Canadians were taken by surprise last October, is that we did not take this Islamist declaration of war against the west seriously.

From the perspective of the Islamists, both Sunni and Shiite Muslims, there are two fronts, the near and the far, and these are linked. Consequently, the conflicts of the Middle East, or the Muslim world, are global and therefore they reach us.

Canada is not insulated from the madness, barbarism, or savagery of a war that Canadians might not comprehend or deny having anything to do with. But we Canadians are affected, whether we like it or not, because of the nature of our open society, of the flow of immigrants from the Middle East and the larger Muslim world, and the history of our relationship with that part of the world.

It would be naive on our part not to take seriously the reality of the jihadist sleeper cells and Islamist fifth columns in our midst. Long before 9/11, the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood planned and put into place their operatives within the public institutions of western democracies. Documents detailing the modus operandi of Muslim Brotherhood operatives were found by intelligence agencies and submitted as evidence in some of the terrorist trials held in the U.S. after 9/11.

I will end by pointing out that the bitter Shia-Sunni conflict in the Middle East, which is more than a millennium old, will intensify and worsen. The theology and politics of the IS are exterminationist, and its Sunni-driven Shia hatred will invariably elicit similar Shiite response with far reaching consequences.

This conflict will reach the west and will spark sectarian tensions within western democracies, as has occurred as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. We only need to read Dabiq, the official magazine of the IS, as they revive nostalgia among a segment of Muslims with the appeal of the caliphate, and thereby deepen the nature of the declared war between the IS version of the house of Islam and the rest of the world.

They are driven by visions of the end time, of apocalypse, and their fanaticism will crash over their heads eventually. In the meantime, however, we need to take them seriously, for we know from history that politics driven by eschatological visions end dreadfully.

In this context, the measures proposed in Bill C-51 to deal with the nature of threats that Canada faces, I believe, are quite rightly and urgently needed to protect and keep secure the freedom of our citizens.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you very much, Mr. Mansur.

We will go to Mr. Anderson, the executive director of OpenMedia.

[Stephen Anderson, Executive Director, OpenMedia, Protect Our Privacy Coalition]

Good evening. My name is Steve Anderson. I am here today on behalf of OpenMedia, a non-profit digital rights organization. Last year we helped start the Protect Our Privacy Coalition, which is the largest pro-privacy coalition in Canadian history with over 60 organizations. You know we've hit a common Canadian value when groups ranging from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation to small businesses to labour organizations join together.

I'm happy to be joined today by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the principled conservative forum Free Dominion, who will speak on behalf of their organizations

To help ensure that the majority of Canadians are heard, I have brought with me a petition signed by over 100,000 people against this bill, which was gathered by OpenMedia and Leadnow . I've also reached out online to get input for this testimony and I will reference it from time to time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Mr. Anderson, I will just interrupt you for one second.

It is standard procedure that committees may not receive petitions. Petitions have to be presented in the House. That is according to the Standing Orders of the House. It's under routine proceedings under the rubric of presenting petitions. Petitions may not be presented at committee. However, what you may do, sir, is present them as an exhibit, should you wish to leave them with the committee. As such, they are there for the consultation of the clerk. Under those conditions, they need not be translated.

I just leave that with you, sir. If that is your preference, you may certainly leave them with the clerk at the end of the day.

[Stephen Anderson]

I'm happy to do so.

Support of C-51 is plummeting, as we see from recent polls. The more Canadians know about C-51, the less they like it. They're coming to know a lot about it.

Canadians believe that C-51 is reckless and dangerous. That is going to be the main part of the start of my talk, in part because it exhibits a blatant disrespect for our right to privacy. C-51 provides spy agency CSE with an offensive domestic mandate, thereby setting loose the eavesdropping agency on Canadians. By empowering CSE to take disruptive measures, the bill provides the agency with open-ended powers to act against Canadians on our own soil. CSE will now be able to make false attributions to individuals, take down legitimate websites, and implant malware on individual devices. Considering C-51 also facilitates the distribution of information of Canadians without their knowledge or consent to no fewer than 17 agencies and institutions, along with foreign governments, I think Canadians agree with Allen Ramenberg who wrote on Facebook that if we “surrender our privacy and liberties to unaccountable central authorities, the terrorists have won”.

I've heard a representative from the government claim that our sensitive data will not be stored in one big database, but I wonder why the legislation then explicitly states that the data will be “collated”. That said, even if the data is flowing between multiple databases, that might leave Canadians even more open to victimization of data breaches and cybercriminals. I'd like to add that more than 200 Canadians have come forward in recent months to say that their personal or professional lives have been ruined due to information disclosure. Privacy is security in its most basic and individual sense.

I'd like to note that not only is C-51 reckless and dangerous, it's also, frankly, ineffective in achieving its own stated aim.

As Professor Roach pointed out to this committee, C-51 will drown the government in information rather than providing actionable data points. Furthermore, with zero added oversight or accountability, there's no way to even know if these powers are working as intended. Experts agree that we need targeted tools for the digital age, not mass disclosure of personal data. Additionally as a concern, many elements of the bill are not even focused on terrorist threats, but rather apply broad security-oriented powers to a range of other less serious contexts.

Careless drafting of this legislation will muddy the waters of investigations, taint the work of security officials, and make Canadians less safe. Sadly, for a bill that purports to take on terrorism, it also lacks any measures to address the root cause of radicalization.

Bill C-51 is reckless, dangerous, and ineffective both in content and process. The bill is deeply flawed and must not be made law.

I'll close with this comment submitted to me by a young Canadian on reddit. He said:

As a Canadian citizen I feel that our country fosters and promotes values that encourage upcoming generations to voice their opinions and outlook without fear of repercussion or consequence. This is a Canadian value that, in my view, should be perpetuated....

Thank you. I'll turn it over to my colleague now.

[Sukanya Pillay, Executive Director and General Counsel, Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Protect Our Privacy Coalition]

Mr. Chair, Mr. Clerk, honourable committee members, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Mr. Chair, how much more time is left in the 10 minutes?

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

There are five minutes.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Thank you.

[Sukanya Pillay]

I thank my colleagues and OpenMedia for sharing their time. I appear on behalf of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. We are an independent national non-governmental organization which for 50 years has effectively protected civil liberties in this country. You have our detailed submissions, and in the interests of time I will restrict my comments to four minutes and two points.

Let me state at the outset that the CCLA understands that the government requires effective tools to protect Canada and its people from terrorist threats and acts. What we do not understand is why this bill is needed, given the existing robust, and in some cases exceptional, tools at our disposal and the success rate of law enforcement and courts, most recently demonstrated with the VIA Rail terrorist convictions. It has not been shown that Bill C-51 provides any necessary new tools, and we are concerned that it will increase powers without any commensurate increase in accountability mechanisms. My two points are as follows.

First, I am going to turn to the security of Canada information sharing act, which I will refer to as SCISA. SCISA expansively allows for unprecedented sharing of information across at least 17 state agencies with foreign governments and foreign and domestic private actors without enforceable privacy safeguards and without clearly limiting the information to terrorist activities or threats. This is overbroad. The legislative objective of SCISA to keep Canada safe from terrorist threat is beyond dispute, but the drafting of SCISA is not. Without enforceable safeguards, information sharing will result in error. The surnames of Arar, Almalki, Nureddin, Elmaati, Abdelrazik, Benatta, and Almrei are serious, terrible reminders of the devastation wreaked by misuse and mistake in information sharing. Failure to properly share information also resulted in the failure to prevent the Air India tragedy when flight 182 was bombed, killing all 329 people aboard.

SCISA does not heed any of the recommendations of the Arar commission for integrated review of the integrated operation of agencies, nor for statutory gateways to facilitate such review, nor does it benefit from the lessons and in-depth study of the Air India commission. Existing mechanisms for national security agencies are simply inadequate in the context of SCISA. The reference to the caveats in the guidelines is undermined by subsequent provisions which allow for further sharing of information with any person for any purpose, and also by civil immunity for information mistakenly shared in good faith. In the national security context, information sharing requires proper legal safeguards of necessity, proportionality, and minimal impairment, and requires written agreements and caveats with respect to reliability, use, dissemination, storage, retention, and destruction. All of this is wholly absent in SCISA.

Next, I will talk about the CSIS Act amendments, and I have three brief points.

First, the amendments transform CSIS from the recipient, collector, and analyst of intelligence into an agency with powers to act. There is no explanation for this radical transformation at odds with the findings of the McDonald commission, which heralded distinction between intelligence and law enforcement.

Furthermore, there is no limit on what CSIS' disruption powers will be, other than the outer limits of bodily harm, obstruction of justice, and violation of sexual integrity, thereby indicating a very large sphere within which CSIS can operate. These new powers will blur the lines between intelligence and law enforcement and may further increase tension between the mandates and practices of CSIS and the RCMP, which can undermine security. Blurring the lines between intelligence and evidence may in fact undermine terrorist prosecutions.

We are also concerned by the judicial warrant that would enable CSIS to contravene the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This is a shocking prospect to the CCLA, given that Canada is a country committed to constitutional paramountcy in rule of law, not to mention independence of the judiciary. Furthermore, the process would be conducted ex parte and in camera.

In conjunction with Bill C-44, Bill C-51 permits CSIS to act at home and abroad without regard to foreign domestic law and international law. In our view, this contravenes Canada's binding legal obligation and is a dangerous signal to send to foreign governments and agencies.

We close in respectfully reminding the committee that, across the board, safeguards and accountability mechanisms are not meant to be impediments to national security; rather, they ensure that we do not, however unintentionally, violate or impair constitutional rights of innocent law-abiding people in Canada, that we do not waste or misdirect precious national security resources, that we do not tarnish, harm, or ruin the lives of innocent individuals, and in turn that our national security actions are efficacious.

As the Supreme Court stated in Suresh, it would be a pyrrhic victory if we defeated terrorism at the cost of sacrificing our commitment to the values that lie at the heart of our constitutional order.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Ms. Pillay, I'm very sorry. You're well over the time for everybody, on your suggestion, so—

[Sukanya Pillay]

Thank you. I'm done.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

—now we will go to our third witness, Mr. Davies, appearing as an individual.

You have the floor, sir.

[Prof. Garth Davies, Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University, As an Individual]

Good evening.

Thank you very much for inviting me to speak here today. It's truly an honour to be here. Out of respect for the work of the committee, I will try to make my comments brief.

I'm not a lawyer. I will leave the nuances of Bill C-51 to people who are far more qualified than I. What I am is a researcher. I've been studying terrorism for over 20 years now, and it's in my capacity as a researcher that I come before you today to offer my thoughts.

There are just a few points that I would like to make.

The first and the most important is that the danger posed by violent extremism and terrorism is real. The threats to Canada and to Canadian lives are real. I've been following the discussions in the House, and lip service is often paid to these being real, but I'm not certain that we are actually embracing the realities we're facing.

The challenges we face are unprecedented. Those challenges would include, for example, living in a hyperconnected world where borders are meaningless to terrorists. They would include the rapidly expanding use of the Internet for recruitment and for other nefarious purposes. They would include a rise in the kinds of behaviours that have not been experienced at the level we're seeing now, such as, for example, homegrown terrorism, lone actor terrorism, and the potential violence that might be attributed to returning foreign fighters.

These are all examples of the kinds of things that have changed the context of terrorism and our conversations around it. The nature of these threats suggests that we need to modernize our thinking about our approach to counterterrorism. I would argue that Bill C-51 is necessary as part of a larger process that recognizes the new dynamics in this new context, in addition to, for example, Bill C-44 and others that will inevitably follow.

Second, in studying terrorism, one of the things that I think has been most striking and particularly challenging over the years, for as long as I've been studying it, is the speed with which terrorists adapt to detection techniques. They are constantly changing tactics and constantly coming at us with new ways of thinking and doing things.

Many of the methods that we are currently trying to use to deal with these threats have become outmoded. For example, increasingly, there is no group to infiltrate. Increasingly, there is no head of the snake to cut off. There is no one with whom to negotiate. The tools that we've traditionally relied on as standard ways of trying to disrupt terrorism are not as useful to us in these contexts.

At present we are faced with a rather extreme version of Louis Beam's idea of leaderless resistance, where we've gone beyond autonomous cells and simply have individuals who at any particular moment might pop up and commit heinous acts. Also, this will inevitably change, so we are perpetually playing catch-up. It's difficult to determine what will come next. It has been suggested, for example, that the next wave of terrorism may be more technological, so that we're dealing with people and what they can do with technology, and they may not have any kind of ideological purpose other than that. Then we try to embrace and conceptualize what difficulties that might bring.

What we do know is there is learning taking place on the part of these individuals and groups, and that in all likelihood the next attacks will be different. The next attack will likely not involve storming Parliament. The next attack will be something else. We need tools, such as those proposed in Bill C-51, that are adaptable and that allow for some flexibility in responding not just for now, but for the future.

A third point is that the upshot of all this is that we need to get as much information as we can. Accurate, complete, and real-time information is needed to keep up with ongoing potential plots. This means that in certain circumstances we're going to need to use those scary words of “coalition”, of “integration” from different sources, to fill in pictures, to fill in gaps, and to give us the information we need. It also means living up to our obligations as international partners in terms of the sharing of information.

There are of course potential concerns. I'm not blind to them; nobody who has been following them can be. They have been catalogued at length in front of this committee, but I don't believe that they are insurmountable, nor that they should be insurmountable.

It has been argued that we cannot arrest our way out of the problem of terrorism, and that it would be preferable to dissuade people from this path before they've gone too far down the path to violent extremism. This is most certainly true, but we're playing catch-up again.

We don't have good profiles of who is likely to turn violent. We have many theories and many ideas. We are developing many models and we're working on many projects, but right now we simply don't know. In the interim, we need the ability to act quickly, decisively, disruptively when necessary, in part at least in response to changing conditions on the ground.

We're not talking about acting haphazardly. We're not talking about acting randomly. We believe that with any luck our tools will continue to evolve such that we can be more targeted in how we collect information. As an example, colleagues and I are working at SFU to develop a series of algorithms that allow us to parse information on the Internet in a much more effective way so that we're not just targeting out there, but trying to actually use a series of key words and phrases, and trying to be more specific in how we look for information. With any luck, the same technology that terrorists are using to recruit our young people can also be used to minimize ad hoc intrusions into privacy.

We need to be creating a framework for the future, one that's flexible enough to deal with the nature of the threat that we may not even be aware of yet. This bill, I think, reflects the times that we live in and casts an eye towards threats that may not be that far down the road.

Thank you for your time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Daryl Kramp]

Thank you very much, Mr. Davies.

We will now go to our first round of questioning for seven minutes.

Ms. James, you have the floor first.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Welcome, and thank you to our slate of witnesses.

I noticed a common thread in the testimony of both Professor Davies and Mr. Mansur with regard to stating that terrorism is real and that there are some who do not see the same danger as maybe some other people do, and I think it was you, Mr. Mansur, who said it was actually unhelpful.

Last week I did a couple of call-ins to radio stations. I find it extremely unfortunate that there's been such misinformation put out about this bill, specifically with regard to the information sharing act. This is new. It's stand-alone. It does not connect to the other parts of this particular bill. There are five parts. There are some claims that this is somehow an attack on personal freedoms and information sharing, that it's going to infringe on the rights of Canadians. If you actually read the bill, that is simply not the case.

We heard earlier from the B.C. civil liberties group. They are actually a group that had problems going back 30 years, I believe, to the original CSIS bill. Some of the same claims that we're hearing today are some of the same claims we heard with the original 2001 Anti-terrorism Act, and quite frankly it is unhelpful, because what we're dealing with right now is the national security of this country and the protection of Canadian citizens.

I just want to let you know that you made a comment that some of us don't get it. I get it, and that's one of the reasons that this is the number one priority of our Conservative government, to get legislation passed that is going to improve the safety of Canadians.

I just wanted to talk about the information sharing act. It's clearly defined in the act. There's another section in there, which is proposed section 5, and it talks about disclosure of information, and that it can only be shared if it is relevant to the national security jurisdictional responsibilities of the recipients. There are multiple parts in this bill that protect the civil liberties of Canadians. It's also interesting that I've yet to hear someone actually pinpoint what clause of this bill would actually impact a law-abiding Canadian. We hear that there's this case and this case, and that someone was wrongly convicted, but that's why we have the court system. People can take action and get retribution. That's what happens in a democratic and free society.

I'm just wondering if you could comment on the unhelpful information that's out there and the fact that it has taken away from what is actually important, which is the national security of Canada.

We'll start with Professor Davies.

[Prof. Garth Davies]

Thank you for the question.

I think the comment I would make back, madam, is individual cases and tragic cases that we've seen don't necessarily make good policy. While we certainly don't want to minimize the danger that it comes from, I think there is a reciprocal danger of developing policy that is based on one or two, or three bad cases. As you argue, it's much better, I think, to think more broadly about the applicability of these things and try to deal with deviations from them as they pop up. That would be my argument.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

Mr. Mansur, we heard from other witnesses about the need to modernize the tools and capabilities that we provide to our national security agencies.

I'm going to read something that appeared in the National Post, from a criminal prosecutor for the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General. He talks about the separation between CSIS and the RCMP, done at a time when cellphones were a luxury, the Internet didn't exist, and Canada had never been the target of a terror attack, and when that separation had made sense. He said:

It does not make sense any longer. Virtually all of Canada's allied countries give their spy agencies powers to prevent terror attacks. Requiring CSIS to report their findings to the police, who then review that evidence and decide what to do with it, adds layers of unnecessary bureaucracy to their investigations. Worse, it causes delay—and in a time when terror suspects can co-ordinate across continents in a matter of seconds, that can mean the difference between prevention and a successful attack against Canada.

Do you agree with these concerns that this prosecutor wrote in this letter to the editor?

[Dr. Salim Mansur]

I do, more or less, yes.

[Roxanne James, Conservative, Scarborough Centre, ON]

With regard to the bill itself, at the very first meeting we heard from the national security agencies that there were legislative gaps here in Canada. This bill speaks directly to what have been identified as gaps for our national security agencies.

Surely we must recognize that those who need the tools are the best people to tell us what needs to be done. Again I'm going back to the fact that it's very unhelpful that we're hearing misinformation being put out. It's interesting that there were protests not too long ago, and funnily enough, none of those protests would fall anywhere under the guise of this bill.

Unfortunately, those people who were protesting don't know that. They think that protesting is going to somehow be illegal and that they're going to be thrown in jail or labelled as terrorists. Those protests were actually an example of what is not covered under this bill.

I'm hoping that message gets out.

We heard as well, when we talked about borders being meaningless—I think it was you, Professor Davies, who talked about that.... I think this is what is different between now and 30 years ago, when the CSIS Act was first created.

We heard from prior witnesses about modernizing and about the fact that the terror threat is ever-evolving. I'm glad you mentioned the fact that there's no longer an organization to infiltrate or the head of a snake to cut off and that we have to be flexible and be able to adapt—I believe you used the words “adaptable legislation”—so that as things change, we don't have to come back here next month or next year and rewrite this legislation again.

Is that what you were referring to?