Historically, we do have a siloed system. We've created independent external review bodies that are focused on a particular agency of the government, SIRC for CSIS, the CSE commissioner for CSE, and what is now the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission for aspects of the RCMP. Many other elements of the security intelligence community, as Mr. Atkey has pointed out, have not been subject to independent review. When we talk about a siloed system for review, or “oversight” as some people call it, that's really what we're referring to.
What Bill C-22 does is partly fix that problem by giving this proposed new committee of parliamentarians the opportunity, with the mandate written into Bill C-22, of taking a very broad look at all of the agencies of the security intelligence community. My only caveat about that is simply the cautionary reminder that while it can do that, it won't be doing that most of the time. There are going to be core agencies they need to look at, and maybe Parliament and the public of Canada need to understand that as it's written out legibly in the legislation, these are the key agencies that matter, but it will have that strategic level look.
The piece of work that remains—possibly for this committee, in the context of looking at the national security framework and the green paper, and possibly for the government down the road—is that it's one thing to create a committee of parliamentarians, but what are you going to do about the legacy review accountability mechanisms, including these siloed agencies and the relationships between the proposed committee of parliamentarians and other standing committees in terms of what they will look at? There is a lot of work that needs to be done. The Minister of Public Safety has referred to this a bit by suggesting he's open to the idea of creating something like a super-SIRC or bringing the siloed agencies together as a different layer of review.
I think the government has focused on Bill C-22 as it's first act in this field, but I think more work will have to be done.