Based on experience, sometimes you can over-legislate, and you're looking for too many exceptions. In my experience in dealing with CSIS over five years and subsequently with the Arar commission and as a special advocate, CSIS wants to protect two things at all costs. I think this is true of other security agencies within the government as well. One is their human sources, which they call the holy grail, what we want to protect. The other is methods of operation. They don't like to disclose the particular methods of operation to anyone they don't have to do so.
We would have long meetings with CSIS and we'd ask where they got this information. They would reply, “From a source in Vancouver”. We'd ask who was the source. They would reply that they'd prefer not to tell us. They would acknowledge that we had the right to that source if it were fundamental to our investigation, but there would be discussion among top secret security cleared people back and forth as to what was appropriate. In many cases, CSIS would persuade us that we did not need to know the particular name or address of that source or the methods of operation, because some of them were quite sophisticated. Some of them were related to simpler surveillance under wiretap legislation. We did get to know that. Now most of that is in the public domain.
A healthy tension existed between the review body and the agency, and it worked. From time to time there might have been disputes. In our CSIS act, we had the power to get anything within the body of CSIS, except cabinet confidences. We honestly never felt that we were frustrated, except in one situation that I can explain to you. In 1989 we wanted to have an inquiry into Air India, because CSIS wasn't being totally forthcoming with us on what was going on with Air India. We had many meetings back and forth. CSIS had to remind us—and it was there in the legislation, as our lawyers told us—that our jurisdiction only related to CSIS and the trail related to security accountability, which led into the RCMP and other agencies like Transport Canada. It was a more complicated type of situation, which ultimately was not resolved until the appointment of John Major and the Major commission in the next century. That was the only time we came to a fundamental disagreement.
We were right in our hearts but wrong in law, because the CSIS act said we shouldn't go into that. Sometimes, as in Bill C-22, there is a tendency to over-legislate, because this is new and it's a fresh step. But to be bold, a committee of parliamentarians, if they're supposed to do their work, should all be top secret security cleared. Having gone through a top secret security clearance with fear and trepidation on three occasions, it's not that bad. That should be fundamental for a committee of parliamentarians, and they should have access to everything, except confidences of the Privy Council.