Evidence of meeting #20 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 division.
A video is available from Parliament.
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
Ralph Goodale Liberal Regina—Wascana, SK
CBSA has the responsibility of administering the tariffs of Canada. It does not establish the tariffs. The policy decision is essentially taken by the Department of Finance.
The short answer to the question is that several departments of the Government of Canada are focused on this issue, understand the concerns of producers, and are working very hard to find a solution that will satisfy the needs of Canadian farmers.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Alain Rayes Conservative Richmond—Arthabaska, QC
I hear what you are saying, but my question is about finding out whether there is more money in this budget and whether the details of what the government plans to do to solve this problem are described. The government has said that it wants to solve this problem. We hear about it in the House given that a lot of questions have been asked about it. This is a really urgent problem.
My question is very simple: is there new money in the budget to solve this problem at the border?
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
Ralph Goodale Liberal Regina—Wascana, SK
Let me ask Ms. Lizotte-MacPherson to describe the situation and whether additional revenue for CBSA is required in these circumstances.
12:45 p.m.
Conservative
Alain Rayes Conservative Richmond—Arthabaska, QC
As I would like to ask other questions, I don’t want to know the details. I just want to know whether or not money has been allocated, and if so, how much.
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
Ralph Goodale Liberal Regina—Wascana, SK
My information is that money has not been allotted in the budget for the simple reason that it's not necessary. If CBSA needs to reassign personnel to deal with a particular issue, they do that internally. It doesn't require an extra allotment from outside.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
Alain Rayes Conservative Richmond—Arthabaska, QC
That is great. You have answered the question well. Thank you.
My second question goes to the officials from the Security Intelligence Review Committee.
We know the significance of radicalization. We are hearing a lot about it at the moment. We can see that amount of $3 million has been allocated for this issue in the overall budget and that the committee is asking for $1.9 million to deal with the increasing complexity of its workload and $2.2 million for all the relocation of offices and modernization of equipment, and so on.
Could you tell us what you would like to do with those $2.2 million and could you clarify that the amount of $1.9 million is allocated for new human resources? If so, would you tell me how many people you are thinking of hiring in this area?
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Ralph Goodale Liberal Regina—Wascana, SK
Can you just tell us exactly what budget item you're referring to?
12:50 p.m.
Michael Doucet Executive Director, Security Intelligence Review Committee
It would be in the Security Intelligence Review Committee—
12:50 p.m.
Executive Director, Security Intelligence Review Committee
Thank you.
To respond to your question on the main estimates for SIRC's budget, our relocation and modernization project is roughly $2.1 million, and the funds are being provided to SIRC primarily this year and next. The reason for that, first, is that we have to change facilities. Our current facility is being decommissioned and, therefore, we have to move. Second, we are upgrading our IT environment, which is out of date. That's what we're referring to as a our “relocation and modernization project”.
With respect to the $1.8 million in increased capacity, that is primarily for human resources to not only review the service but also to handle complaints against the service.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
Alain Rayes Conservative Richmond—Arthabaska, QC
That's great.
How many people are you planning on hiring with that budget increase of $1.9 million?
12:50 p.m.
Executive Director, Security Intelligence Review Committee
For this financial year, we are planning on hiring 11 full-time equivalents.
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
Alain Rayes Conservative Richmond—Arthabaska, QC
With $1.9 million, you are going to hire 11 people?
12:50 p.m.
Conservative
June 2nd, 2016 / 12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Marco Mendicino Liberal Eglinton—Lawrence, ON
Mr. Minister, it's good to see you. Thanks for coming this morning.
You testified earlier this week before the Senate on the need to strengthen transparency and accountability on the national security file. When you were there, you identified a gap with respect to review and oversight in the CBSA. Do you recall giving that testimony?
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Marco Mendicino Liberal Eglinton—Lawrence, ON
I want to take this opportunity to try to educate the members of the public and the committee about the distinction between review and oversight. What I'd like to do is to talk about a few concepts under each of those two headers, and then I want to hear your ideas about how you draw that distinction in the context of the new parliamentary committee that will be created with forthcoming legislation.
Review, in my mind, is generally retrospective. It looks backwards in time. It tends to be public, although there are aspects of certain review committees that do consider information that is confidential and sensitive. Moreover, review committees do adjudicate external complaints from civilians. That's the review side.
The oversight framework that I believe we're contemplating on a go-forward basis with new legislation could be operational and real time. It's likely to preside over this committee largely in camera. The general rule of thumb would be that it would not be accessible to the public. Moreover, it may not adjudicate external complaints from civilians.
Those are the two conceptual ways that I see review and oversight. The question I have for you is this. Take CBSA right now, which has no external review body that looks after that specific organization within the Public Safety portfolio. How would you keep review and oversight conceptually apart? Or do you see that the oversight committee would exist concurrently with some of the pre-existing review committees? How do you see that working?
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
Ralph Goodale Liberal Regina—Wascana, SK
Each one of the security and intelligence operations of the government has some amount of review apparatus attached to it now. In the case of CBSA, it does not have a mechanism to review specific officer conduct and complaints from the public about that conduct. That's a clear gap in the process that we intend to fill, and we're considering a variety of tools for doing that. It may be a body like the civilian review committee that applies to the RCMP. Others have suggested that we shouldn't have a separate review body for each one of these agencies, but some kind of comprehensive review body that can examine all of them together, and thereby cross-fertilize the experience, if you will. We're looking at all of the alternatives as to what would be the best arrangement. Senator Moore, in the other place, has come up with the idea of an inspector general for the CBSA. That's one of the ideas that will be taken into account.
As we have developed the concept of the overarching committee of parliamentarians, it has become obvious that there are some gaps, like this one in relation to the CBSA, that will need to be filled. We'll have to think through very carefully the relationship between the existing review bodies, or some new configuration of those review bodies, and the committee of parliamentarians. How does it all fit together? The objective here is not to have three or four different review bodies all examining the same thing, wasting time and effort, and not doing the job that Canadians would expect them to do, but in fact to make sure that they work efficiently together and comprehensively cover the waterfront so there are no gaps in the process. We don't want to create redundancies where they're all doing the same thing over and over again.
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
Marco Mendicino Liberal Eglinton—Lawrence, ON
Am I correct in inferring from your answer, which was very helpful, that the best solution to all of this is to have a clear mandate for each of these various bodies, which are all aimed at enhancing transparency and accountability? When it comes to creating this new parliamentary committee for oversight, it would spell out its mandate in clear language and the relationship between that new parliamentary committee and the other pre-existing review committees.
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
Ralph Goodale Liberal Regina—Wascana, SK
The language obviously does need to be clear as to what we expect the committee of parliamentarians to do. When Mr. LeBlanc has his homework done, that legislation will be put before the House in the next short while.
In terms of the working relationship among the various organizations, I think that's going to take a little bit of time for the organizations themselves to understand how they work well together. I'm sure that the committee of parliamentarians would very much benefit from consultation with Mr. Doucet about the expertise that SIRC can bring to the table, and what SIRC can do better in these circumstances than the committee of parliamentarians, for example, and what the committee of parliamentarians could do better than SIRC.
From my consultation with the review bodies, I think there's a real desire to work together and to make this work efficiently. We all understand that the bottom line here is to keep Canadians safe and to safeguard Canadian rights and freedoms. Let's get the best expertise properly configured to do that.
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
Thank you, Minister. That's a good ending.
My apologies to the other members who were hoping to ask questions, or answer them, as we have run out of time. We have 20 votes to do and we could simplify it. I have votes on the main estimates and then votes on the supplementary estimates. You will see that you have a large sheet of them. We could consider all the first 15 motions together or we could vote on them individually. I need unanimous consent to vote on the 15 motions together. Do I have unanimous consent?
Mr. Dubé.
12:55 p.m.
NDP
Matthew Dubé NDP Beloeil—Chambly, QC
If we call the question on all the votes, can we still carry them on division, without necessarily having a recorded vote?
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Rob Oliphant
Yes.
All are in favour that we will consider them together, and you would like it to be a recorded vote, or on division—