Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Ministers and officials, for being here.
It's great to be on this committee. I acknowledge the work that has to be done on this. We had a difference of opinion in the previous Parliament, but that difference of opinion is now settled. Now we have to make it work. If I can misquote Lady Macbeth, who said, “If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly”, in our case it's “'twere well it were done right”. That's our responsibility.
I'm going to go back to the Liberal Party election pledge. The promise was to “create an all-party committee to monitor and oversee the operations of every government department and agency with national security responsibilities”. That was the Liberal pledge.
Now, what we see in, for example, clause 14 of the bill is a veritable kitchen sink of exclusions from what the committee can look at. The Queen's Privy Council, cabinet documentation, and so on; I get that—although PCO is very broad sometimes in their definition of what is cabinet documentation, so we have to ward against that. Ongoing defence intelligence activities; I get that. Disclosure of the witness protection program sources; I get that. Then there is “information relating directly to an ongoing investigation carried out by a law enforcement agency” that could lead to prosecution, which could be pretty well anything that the security agencies are doing.
As my first question, how can we make sure that this committee is effective if there are so many exclusions? To the extent that anything that is ongoing is excluded, aren't we just a second security and intelligence review committee at that point? What is so special that we can say this committee can do when ongoing activity is all excluded from the purview of the committee?