Certainly.
I take great offence to the common comment that's been made around the idea of the slippery slope and that now anybody who had an issue they'd like to protest will now become a target of the security establishment. I think you should not, as a group of individuals, flatter yourself to that degree. We never had enough time, when I was the director general of counterterrorism or as the assistant director of intelligence, to do more than the top crust of those in the layer of the red, high-risk, high probability zone. That meant that we had no time to even consider looking at any lesser evils that were emerging out there. I hate to think about what my former colleagues are facing today.
The second part is that lawful advocacy, protest, and dissent is implicitly and explicitly protected in the CSIS Act currently, and it's not changing with the new legislation. In fact there are some pieces in there that reinforce that particular requirement.
Lastly and specifically to your question on section 21, the warrant process is the most onerous warrant process of its kind, in my estimation, around the world and that's the current warrant process. The enhancements being proposed will add layers of requirements, giving direction to the judiciary and giving those who are composing the warrant—whether they be the officers working at CSIS, and the legal teams at the Department of Justice, and the public safety minister's office—to hit a new threshold that will be even more complicated and difficult. Unlike law enforcement sometimes, where you can get a warrant after about three or four pages on an affidavit or an information to seek, CSIS warrants typically go on for hundreds of pages per target, explaining the rationale and making the case to be able to obtain those powers that allowed us, at the time I worked at CSIS, to lawfully intercept some of these communications, for example. I am still encouraged that this will not change. My sense from reading the legislation is that those safeguards are protected and are further enhanced.