Public Safety committee  On that, I'd make two points, and this goes less to law than it does to culture. Mr. Atkey, who appeared in front of you, was the first chair of SIRC. Mr. Atkey, in the course of being chair, established a culture at SIRC that was quite robust and probably made more of that bod

Public Safety committee  I think staffing is going to be very important. I won't repeat what Professor Roach said about the need to staff robustly and perhaps staff outside of the traditional public service career pattern, in terms of bringing in special advocates who are the only non-governmental expert

Public Safety committee  That's correct.

Public Safety committee  Well, it's hard for me to comment, because the decision is 137 pages long and it was issued just as I was walking over here for this committee hearing. I've only read the summary. I think it's going to be an important decision. I think it relates to a long-standing question as t

Public Safety committee  Things playing out organically is the Canadian way, otherwise known as muddling through. It's suboptimal because it creates unnecessary conundrums. Ron Atkey, in his prior testimony, raised concerns about the degree of interface that's now possible, given the current drafting of

Public Safety committee  I think you have to think that through, although I know you're constrained in these sorts of amendments that you can make to the bill in its present form. But at the very least, you're in a position to say that the expert review bodies and the parliamentary committee need to be o

Public Safety committee  Let me put this more—

Public Safety committee  If we imagined a scenario where we wanted an Air India style of investigation, we'd see the committee would be blocked because of clause 14. It refers the matter to the RCMP civilian complaints and review committee and to SIRC. The RCMP body has its own restrictions on informatio

Public Safety committee  Yes, I think we have a substantial amount of experience that did not exist when the U.K. stood up its ISC. So if I were to use an analogy, I would say we should at least be able to conduct ourselves at a light jog.

Public Safety committee  Yes, I would.

Public Safety committee  Yes, I would. In fact, I find that the mandate of the committee, clause 8, subject to the conversation we just had about the ministerial veto, to be quite attractive.

Public Safety committee  Certainly, and the pattern in the United Kingdom is that this practice has been codified. What's unique about the 2013 amendments to the U.K. system is they provided that a lot of the details would be articulated in a memorandum between the ISC and the U.K. executive, and that's

Public Safety committee  The portion that follows the comma, the “unless” part and forward, is the ministerial veto, and this is the part that troubles. You wouldn't want to get rid of the portion before that. I would be very content, however, to see the veto go, in part because I don't understand why th

Public Safety committee  Yes, I think those sorts of indicators would be important. I would also indicate that the practice with ISC, as I understand it, is that when redactions are made it's not just a series of asterisks, which gives you no indication as to the volume of redactions, but there's a blank

Public Safety committee  I would say so. I would also ask the committee to recognize what subsection 8(1), “special operational information” in the Security of Information Act is supposed to do. That's the class of information that if you reveal, you go to jail. That's disclosure in a matter that's quit