The answer is yes. Particularly Australia, the U.K., the U.S. and also Scandinavian countries have a lot to teach us in terms of drawing the appropriate line between not revealing information that would be threatening to Canada's national security and where the security agency is not, in effect, protecting its own inadequacies in the performance of its duties as described in the mandates to the ministers that oversee them.
In Canada, I think we have far too much polite agreement with security agencies that say that they can't tell you this or that. I think it's a cultural issue. To some extent, frankly, I feel that they disdain parliamentary committees and do their best to tell you as little as possible for fear that if you find out something, it might reflect negatively on them or on past assessments that may not have been accurate.
I do think there needs to be more trust of parliamentarians to maintain secrecy. We need to be looking at the kinds of parliamentary or congressional committees that exist in other countries. We need to try our best to see if we can make Canadian committees more able to inform decisions about what legislation needs to be made based on a full understanding of what is going on.
I really don't think that in any other country the Cameron Ortis matter would be suppressed for so long, or that Quentin Huang, who was alleged to have transferred military technologies to the Chinese state—