Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her question. No one has the right to torture anyone. No one has the right to use information obtained through torture. Canada has signed conventions prohibiting the use of torture. Canada—and by extension, every agency, department and body under its authority—must uphold these conventions.
CSIS is not above the law. Its purpose is to carry out threat assessments. The worst part of all this is that CSIS says that it uses information obtained through torture. This is dangerous because such information sources are not reliable. CSIS is, therefore, producing inaccurate assessments. And if its assessments are inaccurate, we need to ask ourselves how this is affecting our security. We are essentially entrusting this agency with the duty to conduct assessments regarding the threat of terrorism when it has clearly stated that on occasion it uses information obtained through torture—inaccurate information—when it sees an extreme threat.
The Omar Khadr case is the best example and clearest evidence of this. He admitted under torture that he saw Maher Arar in an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. And yet we now know that this is not true. But that is to be expected. When you are 15 years old and end up in Guantanamo being tortured, you will go so far as to say that you have seen extraterrestrials. You will say any absurd thing just so that they stop torturing you.
Statistically—and all the studies show this—information obtained through torture is not only immoral, it is unreliable.
So we have one agency, which is giving unreliable information to the RCMP, which in turn spends our money conducting investigations based on unreliable information. The worst part is that we give them half a billion dollars a year to carry out this kind of assessment.
Instead of passing legislation introducing two useless provisions, we need to properly overhaul the law governing CSIS and review the way it does things. That is what we need to do. We should not be debating two completely pointless clauses today; we should be talking about what needs to be done with CSIS in order to make it effective, competent and accountable.