I'm not very well prepared because I only found out about the hearings this morning and I've been working all day.
I want to speak about the issue of accountability and the lack of expert oversight...CSEC, CSIS, the RCMP, all of the agencies working together as they would under Bill C-51, and as they have been.
I'm fairly new to understanding the importance of intelligence in making a country safe because, as many people of my background, politics has not been in the forefront. Once I started learning about what was really happening in Canada, I became very alarmed. What really opened up my eyes was the layoff of Eva Plunkett. She was the inspector general of CSIS, and Mr. Harper laid her off with no excuse, other than he wanted to save a million dollars. He would save a million dollars by laying her off. Well, officially she retired, but he closed the department. That was expert oversight of CSIS.
All that was left were Mickey Mouse SIRC committees with questionable leaders, one who actually was working for an oil company, Chuck Strahl. I have lost all trust that our spy agency CSIS is really working the way it should.
One of the reasons that Eva Plunkett was let go is because she was critical of CSIS. She provided reports that raised questions that were not taken very willingly by the government at the time.
We've had four years without expert oversight of our spy agency. We talk about Bill C-51 and all the problems there—and are there ever a lot of problems. Nobody is even talking about the fact that nobody is really looking after CSIS, and that's one major cog in this wheel.
I want to know if the Trudeau government is going to reinstate the inspector general office; if they are going to respectfully request the services of Eva Plunkett, who was extremely knowledgeable about what was going on there; and if they can be on top of looking at the problems in Bill C-51, of looking at what's really been going on over the past four years.