I consider both Bill C-71 and Bill C-59 to be vital pieces of legislation that need to receive the appropriate parliamentary attention as quickly as possible. I want to thank this committee for dealing with both of those items of legislation in a very thorough way. There was no compromise on your scrutiny. You examined the issues very carefully. You made a number of recommendations for changes in the legislation and sent them back to the House in a timely way. I thank this committee for that work. Now, both of those issues are before the Senate.
I have had the opportunity to speak with a number of senators about the very heavy agenda that is before them, including Bill C-71 and Bill C-59. They do seem to be optimistic that in the time they have available between now and the summer they will be able to deal with the legislation in a full and final way.
I share the belief that this legislation is vital. It contains very important measures, such as the extensive background checks that you referred to in Bill C-71, which I believe has received support across all party lines.
In Bill C-59, issues that you mentioned included the ability of CSIS to deal properly with bulk datasets, the new authorities that are provided to the Communications Security Establishment, as well as the creation of a new national security and intelligence review agency to get out of these silos for reviewing our security intelligence organizations and to have one review agency that has full jurisdiction to examine any issue in any department or agency of the Government of Canada and follow the evidence wherever it may go.
There's a lot more to the legislation than that, but those are really critical innovations in the law, and it is important for the legislation to receive careful and timely consideration. The communications that I have heard from the Senate would lead me to believe that they are working diligently on the issues before them and are confident that they will be able to discharge their parliamentary duties in a timely way, and I look forward to that.