Evidence of meeting #117 for Public Safety and National Security in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was information.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Conservative
Glen Motz Conservative Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB
Thank you, Chair.
I'm going to go back to my previous line of questioning about the honesty, or lack thereof, of the senior suspect in this particular conversation. Do you believe it's likely, in this case, that he misrepresented himself on the files, and do you believe that he lied?
I'll ask both Mr. McCrorie and Ms. Zafar.
Assistant Deputy Minister, Migration Integrity, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
Mr. Chair, due to the ongoing criminal proceedings, I cannot provide any further details on—
Conservative
Glen Motz Conservative Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB
That's not a question about the ongoing investigation. This is a question about his immigration status and how he got here. Obviously, he came in under false pretense. If what you're telling Canadians is that the systems that you have in place work and that they work fine, then you would have been able to identify some affiliation somewhere, and because you didn't, that would give me rise to believe that either the checks weren't done appropriately or properly, or that somebody misrepresented themselves, which is not new to either one of you and your departments. I'm just wondering if that's the case.
Mr. McCrorie, I would ask you that same question.
Vice-President, Intelligence and Enforcement, Canada Border Services Agency
Mr. Chair, I'm under the same restrictions in terms of what I can comment about in these particular cases.
Conservative
Glen Motz Conservative Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB
We can draw conclusions based on what both of you can and can't say, and I appreciate that.
Ms. Zafar, you mentioned something, and I think, Mr. McCrorie, you did the same thing. You followed the requirements of the legislation for admissibility, admittance, etc.
Do you not think that Canadians have a right to believe and a right to expect that we must always err on the side of caution and that we must always be on the side of national security and public safety when we allow individuals in that we may not have all the answers about?
Assistant Deputy Minister, Migration Integrity, Department of Citizenship and Immigration
Mr. Chair, our officers make every effort to to satisfy themselves that an individual is not inadmissible to Canada. Working with our partners, they will do a thorough review, based on the information that is available to them and to our partners at the time, to make that determination.
My colleague from the CBSA might have something that he wants to add.
Vice-President, Intelligence and Enforcement, Canada Border Services Agency
Again, I would just echo the point that our staff undertake these thorough reviews. The criticism we get as an agency is not that we're not doing thorough reviews. Typically, the criticism is that we're taking too long, because we take the time necessary to do the most thorough review we can based on the best available information at any moment in time. It's based on that information that we provide a recommendation to our colleagues in IRCC.
Conservative
Glen Motz Conservative Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB
As you look at the current structure we have in place now to ensure that individuals do not enter the country in the manner in which this individual did, are there legislative things that we need to look at that need to be fixed? Is there some ideology or some position of this current government on lax immigration standards that impacts this, in your opinion?
Vice-President, Intelligence and Enforcement, Canada Border Services Agency
Mr. Chair, again, one of the reasons we are doing this review is to understand what happened in this particular case. Are there systemic issues? What solutions are required? It may be procedural fixes on our part. It may be allocation of resources. It may be, as I've suggested for CBSA, that we need to do more on the dark web. It may be legislative or regulatory changes.
It's premature for me to speculate as to what they are, but that's certainly on our agenda in terms of what we need to look at.
Conservative
Glen Motz Conservative Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB
Ms. Lantsman asked you a question earlier to which I believe you answered affirmatively. I'm sure every witness today understands what Canadians expect. You understand their concern, I take it. Is that a yes?
Vice-President, Intelligence and Enforcement, Canada Border Services Agency
Yes.
Conservative
Glen Motz Conservative Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB
It's obvious, then, that they need answers, and not just for this committee's sake but for the sake of our national security and public safety moving forward. If one individual got in this way, I'll guarantee you that there are others here already. We already know that, based on the 700 IRGC individuals who are already in this country. How they got here begs another question. How did we let in those people who already have affiliations to an organization that's a terrorist organization?
When you do this deep dive as to where the gaps were, I think you need to go beyond this case and look at all cases for both immigration and the CBSA on how we can fix this broken system, because it is broken.
Vice-President, Intelligence and Enforcement, Canada Border Services Agency
In fact, what we want to do, to your point, is that we want to make sure that we do the level of analysis and the level of thinking about this that Canadians expect of us. I don't want to give you an off-the-cuff answer in terms of what we need to do. We want to make sure we're looking at the system as a whole and not just looking at these two cases. As the minister and Mr. Gallivan indicated, we'll be looking at a representative sample of all the cases that we've processed over a period of time to understand if there are any gaps there and, again, what improvements, if any, we need to make.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Thank you, Mr. Motz.
We'll go now to Ms. Damoff for five minutes, please.
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
Thank you, Chair.
I have a question with regard to the dark web. Several times today, the Conservative Party has talked about videos being readily available and publicly available. I recognize that you can't talk about information in this case, but let me quote from some research that's been done:
Key characteristics of the Darkweb include the inability to search or list them through legal platforms, passwords to gain entry when accessible, and hidden identities of users, network traffic, IP addresses, and data exchanged through them. While Darkweb was originally built for military communication and advocating freedom of speech, it has also provided technology enablement and power to adversaries to masquerade heinous activities.
I'm not being flippant here at all, but perhaps, Ms. Lloyd, this could be directed to you. How do you access the dark web?
Interim Director, Canadian Security Intelligence Service
Mr. Chair, I'm not able to answer that question without revealing the details of our operational tradecraft methodologies and capabilities.
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
Okay. As an individual, is it easy for me to google “darkweb.com” and be able to access information that's on there?
Again, I'm not trying to be flippant. It has been portrayed here today as being easy to access. You can't tell us how to access it, because it's in the national security interest not to share that information. Is it easy for me to access the dark web?
Interim Director, Canadian Security Intelligence Service
Mr. Chair, I think what I can say is that we've spoken a bit this morning about the complexities of living in a digital age. That would be reflected in some of the conversation we've had today about the challenges of being able to access information at the time that information is perhaps needed with regard to decisions that have to be made or files that need to be reviewed.
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
Thank you.
As for the other question I had, it was alleged that Canada didn't do as well as other countries in terms of security checks on these individuals. However, the minister, when he appeared, talked about an exchange he had with the U.K. and how grateful the U.K. was for the information that was provided by Canada.
I think it would be fair to say that the sharing of information allows us to broaden the net to make Canada safer, so it's not necessarily that one country is doing better than another. It's that we have a network, particularly the Five Eyes but other networks as well, where we can share information. It's not that Canada is doing a bad job; it's that we have a network to make Canada safer.
Perhaps I'll direct that to the CBSA.
Vice-President, Intelligence and Enforcement, Canada Border Services Agency
A key element of our security screening program is our ability to gather data. First and foremost, we look at our own data sources, but we also rely on partners both domestically and internationally, especially in the Five Eyes but not exclusively. It is a two-way street. We share information with them and they share information with us, and there's a great deal of utility in that in terms of how we do our work.
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
That sharing is ongoing too. It's happening all the time among the security agencies. Is that correct?
Liberal
Pam Damoff Liberal Oakville North—Burlington, ON
It was just said that our system is broken. I would argue that it's not broken and that what happened in this particular case shows that it's not broken. The work that all of your agencies do—and I commend all of you—actually worked, and Canadians are safer because of that.
It's important not to be fearmongering here and making Canadians start to fear their neighbours, which is the sense that I'm getting from the questions. It's important that Canadians know that the agencies we entrust with our national security are actually doing the work that we entrust them with and are doing it well and keeping us safe.
Chair, I'll leave it at that. Thank you.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ron McKinnon
Thank you, Ms. Damoff.
That wraps up round two. I'm going to suggest to the committee that we take a five-minute break and start again after the break with another round one. Is the committee okay with that?