They're the first set of witnesses, yes. Thank you.
I'll continue with the interim report on paragraph 14: “François Daigle, Deputy Minister of Justice and Deputy Attorney General of Canada, replied to this order, on June 29....”
I'm sorry. I read that already.
Paragraph 16 says:
16. The matter of the interpretation of the thresholds, including the CSIS Act threshold, has lately become a central issue in the proceedings before the Public Order Emergency Commission.
17. According to a pre-hearing interview held with Commission counsel, David Vigneault, the Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service,
stated that at no point did the Service assess that the protests in Ottawa or elsewhere ... constituted a threat to the security of Canada as defined by section 2 of the CSIS Act, and that CSIS cannot investigate activity constituting lawful protest....
Mr. Vigneault emphasized that the threshold imposed by the CSIS Act and under which the Service operates is very specific. For example, the determination that something may not constitute a threat to national security under section 2 of the Act does not preclude a determination that a national security threat under a broader definition, or from the perspective of the public, does exist.
18. Despite February's protests, “at no point”, constituting a threat so as to trigger the Service's own investigative thresholds—which, under section 12 of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, is based on reasonable grounds to suspect, a much lower legal standard than the Governor in Council's burden, under section 17 of the Emergencies Act, of reasonable grounds to believe—Mr. Vigneault recommended to the Prime Minister that a public order emergency be declared, “based on both his understanding that the Emergencies Act definition of threat to the security of Canada was broader than the CSIS Act, as well as based on his opinion of everything he had seen to that point” (Commission document WTS.00000079, page 8).
19. In his public testimony, on November 21, 2022,
—some months later—
Mr. Vigneault confirmed he had been given advice encouraging him to apply a broader definition to the Emergencies Act threshold:
He stated:
So when that was first brought up, the fact that the Emergencies Act was using the same words as the CSIS Act to define the threat, so imported into the Emergencies Act, I needed to understand for myself and for, you know, the course of this, what was the implication of that.
And that's when I was assured that, you know, they were—it was a separate understanding. You know, the confines of the CSIS Act, the same words, based on legal interpretation, jurisprudence, Federal Court rulings and so on, there was a very clear understanding of what those words meant in the confines of the CSIS Act, and what I was reassured by, is that there was, you know, in the context of the Emergencies Act there was to be a separate interpretation based on the confines of that Act (Commission transcript, page 58).
20. Under cross-examination by counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), Mr. Vigneault acknowledged that this was the result of a legal opinion he sought from the Department of Justice (Commission transcript, page 95).
21. This novel interpretation of a “broader definition” became a theme in the evidence given by ministers and senior officials before the Commission—