I thank the member for his question.
Our Five Eyes allies and I, in Canada, collaborate extremely closely on matters of security screening, and so does NATO more broadly. A Canadian secret clearance or top secret clearance is considered an equivalent to a NATO or a Five Eyes clearance. All of those equivalencies are done. When you talk internationally to experts in this field about security screening, all of the same issues are coming up, and many of them have been raised today.
We now live in a world that is very globalized. People have connections all over the place. How do you assure a trusted workforce? How do you ensure that the person in front of you is reliable and loyal at the moment you hire them, and how do you ensure that through their career, as their life changes and as they encounter life events, they remain reliable and loyal? Those are difficult questions to answer.
All of our security screening practices—and by “practices”, I include the work that is done at the working level by screening officials, the tools they use, the information they base it on and, ultimately, the policies by which they do this that are set by Treasury Board—are in play at any given moment. Very frequently, when we learn lessons, it isn't at the level of policy. It's at the level of the training of a security official, the tools that they had and the criteria that they used.
These are judgment decisions that are made. You can look at judgment decisions from two different government organizations and see that one would say, “Based on our threat environment, we would have said yes”, and another would say, “Given our circumstances, we would have said no in that situation.” There are always cases that are right on that edge.
These are ongoing conversations, and the discipline of security screening is a very active one. We are constantly looking for ways to do this better.