National Defence committee  Ms. Alleslev, permit me to say two comments in response to your questions. First and foremost, there are two key players who should also have been involved in the decision-making by the minister. First and foremost is the deputy minister. Just by the very nature of her title and

National Defence committee  My testimony is, having received a caution from the ombudsman—and the ombudsman had no one else to turn to except the minister.... Now the minister is saddled with these allegations. He had a duty first to investigate and second to report, and he had the tools and the authority t

National Defence committee  Mr. Garrison, as far as I'm concerned, the answer to both your questions is yes.

National Defence committee  Various reasons are possible, but I can't put my finger on the exact reason. He certainly had the authority to set up a commission of inquiry, as I mentioned. That would be the appropriate thing to do under the circumstances.

National Defence committee  There is probably the fact that the Minister had known General Vance for at least a decade. If I remember correctly, they had met in 2009, when General Vance had requested that Minister Sajjan, who was a major at the time, go to Afghanistan. They served together. They were comrad

National Defence committee  I cannot respond to that in the abstract, because I would not have known until yesterday what the substance of the allegations were. I can only assume that the ombudsman would have been pretty clear in reporting in confidence to the minister the extent and maybe the seriousness o

National Defence committee  The answer to this is yes. Mr. Walbourne had no choice but to report to nobody else but the minister the allegations made to him by the two complainants. He had also no authority to investigate the matter, so the whole thing was passed on to the minister. The minister had funda

National Defence committee  Could the minister have investigated it because the ombudsman could not? Yes, he could have by relying upon section 45 and you already know that he even had the tools to do this. Had he investigated it, he would have been in a better position to report in a factual matter to the

National Defence committee  Not yet. I'm still waiting for the phone number.

National Defence committee  To be clear, absolutely not. As I said in my opening remarks, he had in fact the duty and the facility, if he wanted to, to have the matter investigated. He could have appointed one of the military judges as a board of inquiry to get to the bottom of it and then act on it. Why di

National Defence committee  Madam Chair, let me open by thanking members of the committee for giving me the honour to appear before the committee on a matter that is of interest to me as a former soldier and as an author and lawyer specializing in military law matters. I have followed the discussion that h

Information & Ethics committee  Before we go there, we must make sure that we don't load up the Privacy Commissioner with any task that is not essential to his basic function. His basic function, as it is set out in the Privacy Act, is the investigation of complaints. That's what it is, and that's one of the re

Information & Ethics committee  We may want to look over the past 10 or 20 years, say, at what the percentage has been for investigative resources and whether this number, as a fraction of the overall resources—monetary and personnel—has been diminishing. I think it has been, and as a result, as complaints may

Information & Ethics committee  In fact, I'm opposing that particular recommendation. The Privacy Commissioner would have the discretion to refuse to investigate a complaint because he would find it frivolous or repetitious or whatever. He would find it, in fact, not to be in accordance with what he would defin

Information & Ethics committee  For 33 years, the Privacy Commissioner has had some of these complaints, and no doubt there have been some complaints that might have been frivolous. Some of those presumably won't get the investigative attention, detail, and resources they would otherwise have.