I have two thoughts on that. One is that a committee of parliamentarians should not be a department of government reporting to a minister, who in that case, if it becomes law, would be the Prime Minister of Canada. A committee of parliamentarians should be a committee of Parliament. It should be the summit of the chain of accountability and responsibility for our national security efforts.
With regard to a kind of national security czar or someone with an office of oversight over all the different agencies, the kind of thinking I had at the time of the Arar inquiry, and I still believe in, was that we should do what the Australians and the Brits both did a decade or so ago. They completely reorganized their national security framework so that they had a coherent, integrated, comprehensive approach to national security. The lines of governance and control were clear.
I think we need to look at the roles and responsibilities of the RCMP in this regard. We need to look at the structure, the organization, and how these agencies work together. The inquiry into the Air India disaster showed the dysfunctionality of the separation of the security service from the RCMP in terms of unanticipated consequences. It was just a disaster. I think we need to go back, however difficult and intractable the issues, and look at it again.