Indeed. If I may, I'll have to respond in English because I was educated in a different country.
Let me just say this. With respect to the Toronto 18, we at the institute started a series of inter-agency meetings just for people to get together. We had the RCMP, the OPP, and the Toronto police together once a month to talk about security issues. These were private, off-the-record meetings not open to the public, and the responsible inspector of the RCMP stood in our meeting and he said, “You know, if it wasn't for the fact that this organization”—namely the Mackenzie Institute—“brought us together at an operational level, we might never have cooperated as well as we did on the work to undertake the problem of investigation of the Toronto 18.”
This is why we talk about fusion centres. It's one thing to have chiefs of police and chiefs of agencies talking. They tend to talk policy, they tend to talk personnel, and they tend to talk terms of reference and budget. But when you're talking with people who are at the pointy end, as we say in the security business, these are the people who are dealing with it on a day-to-day basis and they need to interact on a day-to-day basis and share information on a timely basis.
In the case of the situation on Parliament Hill and in the parking lot in Quebec, agencies knew about these individuals but they weren't sharing the information on a timely basis. As I recall, one of them even had his passport lifted, but this wasn't passed on to other people, and there was no follow-up with this kind of activity.
I'm not saying it would have prevented it. Nothing can prevent isolated actions, that's the brilliance and the terror of the lone-wolf terrorist of which my colleague is an acknowledged expert, but it certainly would have reduced the probability. Today we are not taking advantage of what we already have to integrate the work better than is happening.