Information & Ethics committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. I would like to thank you for inviting Global Affairs Canada to speak to you about the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act. I’m the director general of counter-terrorism, crime and intelligence. Mr. Chair, you have j

Information & Ethics committee  I'm going to ask my colleague Victoria Fuller to respond.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you. The answer is no. We certainly have not seen any kind of misuse of this. I would also point out that, of course, as I made clear in my statement, we deal with these issues with great attention to detail according to the law and individual agreements we have set up wit

Information & Ethics committee  I think, from our perspective, there is no question that it helps. It provides an additional tool. As I mentioned, it provides a general context in which to address these things positively, so I think it definitely helps us in our day-to-day practice, although we do not use it fo

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you. I think this probably would be best addressed to CSIS. Under SCISA, we don't share with the Five Eyes. My own level of contact with the Five Eyes is not specific enough to really be able to honestly respond to your question.

Information & Ethics committee  With your permission, Mr. Chair, I'm going to ask my colleague Victoria Fuller, from the consular area, who is a specialist in this area, to respond. Thanks.

Information & Ethics committee  I don't have a quick response, Mr. Chair.

Information & Ethics committee  On the Global Affairs Canada side, under SCISA we only share information very, very carefully, as I pointed out, with Canadian government entities. It's not the role of our ministry to share information of a personal nature with other governments, so it doesn't apply to our minis

Information & Ethics committee  On our side, SCISA is not a collection authority. I'm just looking to my colleagues, Victoria or perhaps Patrick, on the privacy side, because it's a very specialized question.

Information & Ethics committee  Okay. Thank you for the question. With all due respect, I don't want to avoid your question. I want to respond as clearly as possible. I think we were misunderstood earlier. I have someone with me who is really an expert and who handles this type of communication every day. She

Information & Ethics committee  To receive the information, that's right. We're not a collector ourselves. That would be CSIS or others. Of course, what we're talking about here is not collection per se, but in the case of consular operations, they have a database based on their engagement with Canadians who re

Information & Ethics committee  Just to be absolutely clear, while my title includes “intelligence”, this is really as a result of the requirement to make sure that my group is connecting with the intelligence agencies. We are not an intelligence agency ourselves. The term is perhaps a bit open to a misundersta

Information & Ethics committee  I know you've had previous discussions about this with relevant parts of our organization. Certainly, from my department's perspective, it's simply not an issue. We don't deal with bulk data, and we certainly don't share it. We don't share any information under SCISA outside of t

Information & Ethics committee  Drawing on what's already been said, I don't want to repeat it, but certainly I think on our side we've done a lot to try to increase the robustness of what we're trying to do. We negotiated a specific agreement with CSIS. We've tried to communicate with our posts abroad to make

Information & Ethics committee  At Global Affairs—and I'm checking with both of my colleagues here—there has not been.