Procedure and House Affairs committee  If I said “immediately”, I apologize. They will be briefed, but there will be a period of analysis about what can be briefed and what should be said. The threshold can be too high, and that's a limitation within the CSIS Act. As I said, there is work to be done on that front. The education element that you raised is, I think, the most critical in all of this.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'm sorry. I didn't hear the last part.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I said, “There's no single point of failure.”

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I will say that if a lack of information flow to the Prime Minister were to happen while I'm the national security and intelligence adviser to the Prime Minister, it is my accountability. I will not speak to what happened in the past, but I can speak about what happens during my tenure working for the Clerk of the Privy Council and the Prime Minister.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Again, if the intelligence that had been received when I was on vacation was pertinent to how we did our job in defence, it would have been actioned. There is a difference between “must read” and “may read”, and that's really important to understand. I am being transparent with you when I say I was on that list in July 2021.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I would like to say, first of all, that I am accountable, and I take my accountability very seriously. If there is a failure—

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It does. Thank you. Deputy ministers have accountability as accounting officers in the department. That is, of course, different in the Privy Council Office, because the Clerk is the senior public servant. In my role, I think that more ability to direct within the national security community would be useful.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There are lots of questions there, Madam Chair. First of all, our threshold is too high, potentially. It is something that has to be examined. Again, CSIS is limited by the act. I know the director will have a view of this for you when he is here. The culture in the intelligence community is to protect information and to continue to collect more information.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I have outlined process changes that have been made to ensure that the material is put in front of the right decision-makers, so that decisions can be taken as to how to action intelligence. I also think that it's time, and this has been said by Minister Mendicino and others, that we have a foreign interference transparency regime, that we look at changes to the Security of Information Act and that we look at CSIS changes.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There are a few things, in particular. Number one, with the foreign interference transparency regime, there need to be Criminal Code changes that make it a Criminal Code offence not to disclose. Other countries that have this same regime have taken that step, and it has given some meat and teeth to the regime itself.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'm not sure I'm the best person to analyze what should be done with this job. In other countries, it is a job that has more authority, perhaps. PCO convenes. I don't direct the security agencies, although we are giving more direction to them now in terms of the communication flow and the dissemination and management of material.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I have log-in credentials up to secret. Everything that is TS is presented to me.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I'm not sure I can call them “transmission records”. We'll provide what we have.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  We've done some forensics on what occurred.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I don't think that is, in fact, what the reality is.