Evidence of meeting #162 for Public Safety and National Security in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was report.
A video is available from Parliament.
Executive Director, Secretariat of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
The government told us that this was classified data and that it did not want to disclose these details.
NDP
Matthew Dubé NDP Beloeil—Chambly, QC
This is interesting, especially considering that Australia is a member of the Five Eyes.
I have another question on redacting, particularly with regard to the summary, which must remain consistent with the rest of the document. Does the NSICOP determine how the summary is written?
Executive Director, Secretariat of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
The summary is written by the staff of our secretariat. In this case, after reviewing the sentences or sentence sections and the paragraphs that had been redacted, we decided to reformulate sentences to make them complete and therefore produce a complete summary.
NDP
Matthew Dubé NDP Beloeil—Chambly, QC
Was your decision to use asterisks draw from the British model?
Chair, National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
Yes, exactly.
NDP
Matthew Dubé NDP Beloeil—Chambly, QC
Right, thank you.
I have another question on National Defence and the recommendation to amend Bill C-59 as well as on the definition of the mandate that would be given to the new committee.
Is your committee concerned about the resources that this new sister committee would have to do this monitoring? The resources are already rather limited. If the mandate is expanded, are you concerned about whether the new committee will be able to carry it out each year? I would like it to be and I agree with the recommendation, but the question is whether it will be able to do so adequately given current or planned resources.
Executive Director, Secretariat of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
We aren't aware of the resources and budget available to the new committee. I know that this budget will be much larger than the one allocated to my secretariat because the mandate of the new committee is much broader, but we are not aware of the precise figures. That being said, we agree that resources will have to be allocated according to the mandate.
NDP
Matthew Dubé NDP Beloeil—Chambly, QC
I have one last question, which may be obvious, but which I would like to ask in the 15 seconds I have left.
When you list the criteria—sufficient, but not necessary, or still necessary, but insufficient—according to which you have decided to initiate an investigation or study, can it be said that it is in fact only a guide to inform the public, since you do not necessarily limit yourself to these criteria as appropriate?
Chair, National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
Absolutely.
Liberal
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
Mr. Chair, thank you very much.
Mr. McGuinty and Madam Marcoux, thank you very much for being with us. Congratulations on tabling the report.
Mr. McGuinty, in addition to chairing the NSICOP, which is a committee of parliamentarians and not a parliamentary committee, you also chair the Canadian Group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, or IPU, which is the umbrella organization for the world's parliaments founded in 1889.
This puts you in a very unique position to comment on the role of parliamentarians on two fundamental policy objectives that are very live around the globe today. One is the fight against terrorism and also violent extremism in all of its forms. The other is the fight for diversity and inclusion, the fight for gender equality, the fight against racism and the fight for LGBTI rights.
I'm wondering if I could invite you to comment on your perspectives, your reflections on the role of parliamentarians on these two issues, drawing on the two roles that you currently hold.
Chair, National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
Thank you for the question.
One of the things we've been hearing as a new committee as we interface with our colleagues in Australia, the United States, Britain, New Zealand, the Five Eyes and beyond, is that parliaments worldwide are struggling with this tension between the granting of exceptional powers for security purposes and the ways in which those powers are exercised with the protection of fundamental rights to privacy, freedom, and charter rights in the Canadian context, for example.
We're not alone on this journey. Many countries have reached out to NSICOP already. Ms. Marcoux was in Europe speaking to a number of countries that are fascinated by our approach. We've been invited to countries, like Colombia, and elsewhere to help them build capacity in this regard.
I think it's not necessarily only a Canadian challenge; it's obviously a global one, with the rise of violent extremism and terrorist activity.
However, we have to make sure that we get this balance right. That's what the government's intention was when NSICOP was created, and it is certainly the informing ethic among all the members of all parties who sit on the committee now.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
If you were to put your finger on the one most important aspect of parliamentary dialogue in an unencumbered setting like the IPU where there is no ministerial direction—the reconciliation between these two policy objectives—what would that role be for parliamentarians such as ourselves here on the committee?
Chair, National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
I think the secret sauce in the work that we're doing is non-partisanship. If we learned how to work together in a more non-partisan fashion in many critical areas that we're facing as a country and as a planet—security being one, climate change being another—we might do better by our respective populations, the people we represent. I think that is integral to being able to treat issues like national security in that balance between security and rights.
Liberal
Sven Spengemann Liberal Mississauga—Lakeshore, ON
Thank you very much.
I'll hand it over to my colleague.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Thank you.
Mr. McGuinty, I'd like to put it on the record that without your mentorship when I was a staffer many years ago, I probably wouldn't be at this table today. Thank you for that.
I am happy to see your considerable skills and experience being put to use in this important work, which is very far from the public eye.
Chapter 2 makes frequent reference to Canadians not appreciating the extent of our intelligence services or understanding the various roles.
What is the most important thing you want Canadians to understand that they they don't understand today?
Chair, National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
Thanks for pointing that out, Mr. Graham.
We were struck early on in our steep learning curve about how little Canadians knew about the security and intelligence community in the country: who were the actors, what were their powers, how did they co-operate, how did they not co-operate, how could things be improved, and what are the threats facing the country.
We saw some astonishing polling results about the lack of information in Canadian society. Despite the fact that we have good agencies and departments putting out good information, Canadians are not ferreting out that information, not understanding it and not collating it.
We decided, on a foundational go-forward basis, to provide some 30 to 32 pages at the front end in this chapter to give Canadians a bit of a survey, a security and intelligence 101 course in plain English.
One of my favourite tests that I apply all the time in the committee is, if you can't stop anybody coming off of a Canadian bus or train or commuter vehicle and put this report in front of them and have them understand it, you've failed. We've tried to write and deliver information here for Canadians to understand what's going on in the country in a way that they can get it.
Canadians do get this; they get it perfectly well. It's just that I think we haven't necessarily taken the time to put it in a format and a way that they can understand and digest it. That's the purpose of those 32 or 34-odd pages, to paint a picture and a mosaic of what is going on, and at the same time to show Canadians that historically, security and intelligence has been an almost organic process.
I mentioned earlier that CSIS was spun off from the RCMP—after the RCMP was involved in some shenanigans going way back—from the Macdonald commission. It was given its own statutory footing, and CSE was given its statutory footing. Things evolved, and we think that this is an organic process in the security and intelligence field. We've tried to capture that as well.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Thank you.
I have quite a lot of questions, but I probably won't have time to get through most of them.
Do we have an appropriate number of intelligence agencies? Are there too many, too few?
Before you answer that, table 1 on page 20 lists 17 organizations, and I think there might be one missing. From our work at procedure and House affairs, we've learned that the Parliamentary Protective Service has its own intelligence unit.
Would that fall under your mandate? As a parliamentarian or as a government committee, how would you see that?
Chair, National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
Any federal actor involved in national security and intelligence falls under the mandate of NSICOP. We did not turn our minds to the sufficiency or insufficiency or perhaps over-sufficiency of the number of actors in the field so I can't comment on that.
Liberal
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
You mentioned plain English as an important point.
There's a whole page, page 94, describing the arguments by DND against legislative supervision. Could you boil that down into plain English for us on how that debate went?
Chair, National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians
Manoeuvrability, operational manoeuvrability. We wanted to capture in the report verbatim the submission made by DND for that very reason. We wanted Canadians to juxtapose what we think are the merits of proceeding or considering to proceed this way with a legislative basis and some of the challenges coming forth from our front-line practitioners in the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces, so we reflected that very accurately. In a sense we wanted to give Canadians a shot at the state of the debate in this area.
Liberal
