As I said in my opening remarks, basically this bill is a great way forward. It's a very important step forward—a little late, but very good. I'm extremely positive on the whole about this new committee. I didn't talk about independence all that much, but I added certain things about how a committee is going to be able to look at strategic things, without picking and choosing very specific things, and giving the impression that everything else has also been looked at and doing a very incomplete sampling of intelligence activities in Canada. That would be my first thing: make the mandate look at only policy, law, and the regulations, and the rest should be left to the existing oversight committees. Hopefully, some day there will be another bill about making these committees work better, but for now, I think that would be very important: amending the mandate to do what parliamentarians do best. The second and the most important thing is removing most of the restrictions on what information is to be made available to the parliamentarians on the committee. But for the rest, I'm very satisfied with the basic ideas that are there in the bill.
On November 17th, 2016. See this statement in context.