Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My thanks to the witnesses for joining us.
Let me first turn to you, Assistant Deputy Minister. There is a lot of discussion about the usefulness, the effectiveness, of the Emergencies Act. The legal scholar Patrick Taillon recently explained that, in 1988, when the War Measures Act was rewritten and became the Emergencies Act, there was such a desire to circumscribe the situations under which the act would be invoked that now there must be very grave reasons for doing so. He said: “To meet the high standard required by the act, demonstrators must almost be considered terrorists. This seems to me to be a little exaggerated.”
So it is not enough to tell ourselves that the act was useful, we have to say that it was necessary or essential. I do not want to downplay the troubling abuse or language we witnessed. But some men in a hot tub in the middle of Wellington Street hardly seems a threat to the country's territorial integrity.
Did the Department of Public Safety obtain information from Canadian security organizations that led you to believe that our democratic institutions were really in danger and that this act of last resort needed to be invoked?