Finance committee  One of the challenges we dealt with, and the service would be dealing with today, is that the vast bulk of people who come to this country as new Canadians come from parts of the world where the intelligence services are very unpleasant folk, and it's hard to get out of their min

Finance committee  He personally cannot. That's why he needs tools there. He needs someone whose job it is and who's accountable to the minister. As a minister, when I give a ministerial direction or I approve a policy, someone has to make sure those guys adhere to that, and if they don't, I want t

Finance committee  What you should be concerned about is if your primary objective is to get rid of fat within the system to address the deficit problem and things like that, you look at fat, but you're stuck now with a policy issue that you're not equipped by your expertise, obviously, to look at.

Finance committee  Yes, if you were going to have it being credible, I would have to assume that you'd want to give all the powers that the IG currently has, which include the power to monitor and which I don't see there. Since what they're doing in monitoring is actually going down and looking at

Finance committee  I know, going back a good 20 years at least, that directors have always said that we're the most over-watched body in the world. Those have been traditional complaints.

Finance committee  Yes, a consistent complaint and I was there as their counsel. I attach no weight to it, and I don't attach any weight to it now, because if you are in the intelligence business, you should feel uncomfortable because you have tremendous powers. When police officers do a wiretap,

Finance committee  I can't see how that would affect them. There are probably about four or five reviewers who would look at files. There are 2,500 to 3,000 employees at CSIS. What has caused them to waste some of their effort is the inquiries that they get themselves caught up with. First of all,

Finance committee  I don't know. Let's put it in the following context. We've had recommendations for improvements of oversight flowing out of the O'Connor report. We've had them flowing out of Justice Major's report in terms of Air India. I looked at the most recent reports from SIRC, where they w

Finance committee  It would be a wise course of action. Then you could ask questions as to what CSIS is doing now, what the appropriate model is, or if we're going to give it to SIRC I'm not saying to keep this without something else. I'm just saying that you should conceive of what you think is a

Finance committee  I advised three ministers.

Finance committee  Those are the ministers who were responsible for CSIS.

Finance committee  Pardon me?

Finance committee  No.

Finance committee  No, I don't have any discussions with Michael Ignatieff. My comments to you are based upon my own 20 years of experience in the business and the fact that if you are in it, you realize.... Actually, I'll give you an example. If you simply go back and look at the submission made b

Finance committee  That's correct. I did for about six and a half years.