Just very briefly, I think Canada does have some limited foreign intelligence capabilities, particularly those operated by the Communications Security Establishment and to a certain extent by Global Affairs Canada. There is a lot more we could do. Canada has often faced quiet criticism from its Five Eyes partners for being a bit of a freeloader, a free rider, in the alliance partnership.
I think the key concern I have is that we really do need to build a stronger sovereign capacity to understand the world and threats that are coming at us from the world. I think there's a lot of work that can be done in that regard, both with regard to intelligence collection capabilities—especially something that's forgotten, the importance of intelligence assessment where we have a kind of scattered and diffuse system in the federal government—and also in the system by which we report intelligence that we have acquired and try to make sure that it has an impact on decision-making.
We did say in the CIGI special report that we felt it was important to have a look at the governance of national security in Canada, which has for a long time, of course, been a very decentralized system, siloed and based on departmental mandates and expertise, with relatively little central coordination and control. We did advocate in that report the idea, among others, that there should be a permanent cabinet standing committee on national security and intelligence. Such cabinet committees have been in place in the past. They've currently been replaced by the Incident Response Group, as I'm sure members of the committee know, which is an ad hoc gathering of cabinet ministers and officials that deals just with emergencies and has I think little capacity to do any forward strategic thinking and planning. Thank you.