Public Safety committee  First of all, on behalf of the CACP, I just want to thank you for the opportunity to be here today to speak to the committee. Laurence and I have been looking forward to this. Laurence is going to start out by basically talking a bit about the CACP counter terrorism and national

Public Safety committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'll continue. Building on what Laurence spoke about in terms of harmonizing and working together as police agencies, from the federal agencies to the municipal agencies and the provincial in between, there are three major concerns for the committee to cons

Public Safety committee  It's always a consideration for us. Probably the biggest concern right now, as we discuss it at the committee level, is really the returning foreign fighters and the collapse of the caliphate overseas. That poses a problem. Certainly we can look to our European counterparts and o

Public Safety committee  I would agree with that statement. The fact is that individuals who are interested and motivated to recruit people and incite people to violence and to take action are using the cyber-world, and they have used it quite effectively. That is probably, next to the returning foreign

Public Safety committee  We've taken a multi-faceted approach within our police service. It's about educating our police officers on recognizing the signs of radicalization. Probably the more effective means is community engagement, making sure that our police services, especially the municipal and those

Public Safety committee  Laurence can step in and correct anything I may say on this, but we've had this discussion at the committee level, and there's no specific profile of what a person who gets radicalized looks like. Generally speaking, there are things where they are vulnerable, they perhaps feel

Public Safety committee  With respect, the RCMP has used peace bonds a total of 14 times that they have records of, five of which were the 810.011, which was the peace bond introduced as part of the Anti-terrorism Act of 2015. Currently there are none in effect, but those are the statistics. There's alw

Public Safety committee  My simple answer is that it could. The idea behind the preventative arrests and the recognizance is really to give the police time to determine whether the evidence is there, to see if in fact they are planning a terrorist act. Of course they also allow the judges to assess the e

Public Safety committee  Are you speaking specifically to the encryption piece?

Public Safety committee  Okay. I'll speak to the encryption piece and I'll let Laurence step in from there. I know the debates with respect to privacy and individual rights versus the collective safety and well-being. As I said at the outset, it's about the principles of intercepting those private commun

Public Safety committee  That's a very good question. I've had discussions with our colleagues at the RCMP throughout the province and nationally through this committee and then, of course, locally. I would suggest to you that this type of threat that we're seeing with terrorism, which a lot of people

Public Safety committee  From my perspective, it's about dealing with things in a more timely manner. I don't know if we'll necessarily.... We'll always redirect our resources to the higher priorities—if things are not at the highest priority, they may take a little more time to respond to—so obviously w

Public Safety committee  Go ahead, please.

Public Safety committee  I'm fortunate to live in a jurisdiction where one of our professors at the university is a subject matter expert on right-wing extremism, so I have a little bit of knowledge from her. The one thing about right-wing extremism is it cannot be underestimated here or elsewhere. The

Public Safety committee  It is a change. It's a bit of a different threshold, but “counselling” to an offence has a firmer position in law than what we see with “advocating”. When you talk about advocating, probably the closest thing I can think of is the hate crime legislation. There has been rarely, to