Public Safety Committee on Oct. 17th, 2016

[Micheal Vonn]

I certainly would be very happy to turn my mind to it. The problem with Bill C-51 is that the two acts are chasing each other's tails. The Privacy Commissioner says that what happens in the information sharing act falls within the purview of the Privacy Act, but the information sharing act says that if you have lawful authority for the culling of that information, you have an exemption to the Privacy Act.

The government and the OPC currently do not agree on the operation of how these two acts match. That's part of the inherent complexity of addressing this issue and why I think we need to go back to the drawing board on how to put this together. There currently is not even consensus in the government as to how it works.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Do you have any comments on that, Professor Whitaker?

[Prof. Reg Whitaker]

No.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Okay.

In the CSIS Act, do you think subsection 12.1(3) should be amended so that CSIS warrants can never infringe on the charter, or do you have an alternative wording that should be used in that?

[Micheal Vonn]

We can't recommend how those CSIS warrants should work on the basis of their flying in the face of the rule of law, asking judges to condone the breaking of the law. Certainly it could be made better with special advocates, with somebody in there to argue for rights, someone in there to counter the notion that the story CSIS is telling us is the only one. You could certainly make it better. Would that make it constitutional? I'm not prepared to give an opinion on that, at this point.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

We're actually at the end of our meeting, but I'm wondering, Ms. Watts, if you have one question that you want to ask.

[Dianne Lynn Watts, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Just one?

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

We're at our time, but I'll give you a couple of minutes.

[Dianne Lynn Watts, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Okay.

Thank you for coming. I will ask one question. There's been a mandate, as we've moved forward, in terms of the expansion of information, gathering intelligence, and sharing with our allies as part of the fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. That was a mandate that came out. We heard it from the minister in that regard. With the expansion of information-gathering intelligence, I think in most people's minds it is crucial that we do intelligence gathering, that we do share with our allies, that we work with other agencies globally.

If we're looking to expand that, I'd be interested to hear your opinion on that.

[Micheal Vonn]

It's absolutely citizens' regular expectations that information that is needful will be shared for the purposes of national security. It is the expectation of no citizen I've encountered that the government will be creating large dossiers, essentially, on all law-abiding citizens to enact that trade. That is the direction, as we see from the SIRC report, from the U.K.'s report, that Five Eyes is going. It is very clear, on the SIRC's data holdings review, that those bulk datasets are being used for that purpose. We need to understand, again, exactly what is needful, and we need to eliminate what is not.

[Dianne Lynn Watts, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Right, and I understand what you're saying. Intelligence gathering is big business all over the world. There are private contractors pulling all that information together and selling information on people. It's all out there. I think it's the context of what it is we need to do.

I guess it comes down to this point. Who determines what is necessary? Is it you, me? I think there has to be some very critical thinking around how we protect our country and the work we do abroad as well.

[Micheal Vonn]

To that, I would only say it is a matter of evidence, once again, and the evidence does not support the approach that's being undertaken.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Prof. Whitaker, we'll give you the last word.

[Prof. Reg Whitaker]

I agree completely. I was also involved in the Air India commission. One of the things that we really came up with there was the lack of actionable intelligence around that particular flight when we recreated what was available to them.

I think it's important to distinguish intelligence in general, gathering data in general, and so on, and actionable intelligence that actually can be used in the real world. I think that does require—and this is something that perhaps you should be addressing—greater coordination at the government level. Again, contrary to the silo effect that we keep seeing, there has to be an integrative person or position at the top who can actually coordinate all that intelligence and sift out what is actionable from what is just interesting but perhaps not of immediate interest.

[The Chair, Liberal, Rob Oliphant]

Thank very much.

We're going to end the meeting there.

Just a reminder to everyone, we're back at 5:30 p.m. for anyone who would like to join us for our open-mike meeting.

The meeting is adjourned.