Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and committee members.
I'm David Harris, a lawyer and director of the international intelligence program of INSIGNIS Strategic Research lnc. I have had about three decades' experience in intelligence affairs, including service as an intervenor counsel before the Air India inquiry and Iacobucci internal inquiry, subjects that have arisen, of course, in the course of your considerations.
Canada's security situation is deteriorating. Conventional military and hostile intelligence challenges are manifest, and terror's reach into Canada should have been apparent years before October's terror murders galvanized the public. Canada's position is complicated vastly by an enormous per capita immigration rate approaching 300,000 per annum—half a million if we include so-called temporary visa holders—many from jurisdictions where we have little access for screening purposes.
Bill C-51 is a partial response to our security predicament. lt attempts to come to grips with issues of information sharing, aviation security, terrorist propaganda, and disruption operations. The government deserves our support for the effort, but adjustments may be necessary. Proposed CSIS disruption measures, a necessary tool, could benefit from more consideration and perhaps extensive review approaches. Terrorism advocacy provisions must be consistent with free expression guarantees in the charter. The proposed Criminal Code subsection 83.221(1) should be clarified. Review mechanisms connected to the admirable objective of facilitating information sharing within government should be reinforced. Having said all this, we should find some reassurance in the fact that government activity is subject, of course, to the Constitution.
Before proceeding in detail, I am obliged to clarify matters arising from a recent committee session. l learned later, to my surprise, that I was named there by a member as the source of information upon which was based a question to a witness, the representative of the National Council of Canadian Muslims—NCCM. The NCCM representative responded by saying that the questions were "McCarthyesque". Clarification will be important to the committee's truth-seeking function, and the relevance of these comments in national security terms will become readily apparent. My remarks on this subject are simply my personal opinion on a matter of pressing public interest based on my having followed this group's progress across about 15 years.
The NCCM was founded in 2000 as the Canadian Council on American-lslamic Relations, CAIR-CAN, the Canadian chapter of the Washington, D.C.-based, Saudi-funded Council on American-lslamic Relations, CAIR. This Canadian chapter was founded by Dr. Sheema Khan, with the assistance of Mr. Faisal Kutty and others. ln 2003, as CAIR-CAN founding chair, Dr Khan swore an affidavit asserting that CAIR-CAN was under the direction and control of the U.S. mother organization. By about 2004, several significant former U.S. CAIR personalities and other associates had been convicted of terrorism-related offences, CAIR's former national civil liberties coordinator among them. For a period during her CAIR-CAN chairmanship, Dr. Khan sat on the U.S. CAIR organization's board. According to a 2006 National Post report, CAIR-CAN contributed payments to the Washington office from CAIR-CAN revenue.
ln 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice designated the CAIR mother group—