The potential is clearly there, because some of the state actors, some of the countries that support international terrorism, are also some of the most important threats around proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, for example, and chemical weapons and other conventional weapons.
There is also ultimately the idea that with more capability, along the lines of more opportunities to be creative around the investigative efforts that CSIS would undertake, that could be very transformative. As I mentioned in my comments, CSIS was created at the time when we were in the Cold War. We were focused on counter-espionage operations—long term. Quite often an intelligence officer would arrive from the Soviet Union and we would take four years to decide whether or not that person was truly an intelligence officer. In today's threat environment, sometimes you have weeks, sometimes days, sometimes hours. Sometimes that threat could be very, very thin to notice on the threat scale.
As a result, the current mandate of CSIS is simply to collect intelligence, analyze, and give advice. In a case where we have to bring in a law enforcement agency such as the RCMP or CBSA, the efforts to try to take that intelligence and move it into useable evidence is a very long, detailed process. I was involved in it in the Toronto 18 investigation and in subsequent terrorism-related charges. I worked with the RCMP as the director general of counterterrorism. I can tell you it is a very complex choreography.
This bill will give CSIS a chance to more directly deal with threats without having to engage in that choreography.