I do believe there's a need to bring greater public confidence in terms of the activities of CBSA. I've made a couple of comments.
Oftentimes, people mix the CBSA in the same conversation with CSIS, the RCMP, and CSEC. The first thing you have to recognize is that CBSA is not what I would call a tier one national security organization. It doesn't collect intelligence. It doesn't generate intelligence. It is a user of intelligence that is developed mostly by CSIS, the RCMP, and so on.
When you look at the CBSA, you find that it has a number of review and oversight bodies and so on. When I moved from CSIS to CBSA in 2008, the most striking difference was the public exposure to activities of CBSA. You can't hold anything back from an ATIP standpoint because, frankly, it doesn't meet the test. Everything you do is quite exposed.
I think the one area that is worthy of consideration is around public complaints. The public complaints that are generated are currently investigated within the CBSA. I've always thought that an organization like the public complaints commission of the RCMP would likely be the right sort of review body, but I think the right way to do this is to look at everything the CBSA does and really focus on the one area.
The last point I'll make is that some of the initiatives I've seen in the past had the CBSA looking far more like a CSEC organization, with that kind of review requirement. It just isn't. It isn't a tier one national security organization.