Public Safety committee  Thank you. That's a great question. I'm always delighted to have any chance to talk about intelligence analysis as a function of government, because I think it is completely underrated and under-resourced, and this is a historic problem of long standing. We have a very small anal

Public Safety committee  It's about recruitment. It's about training. Doing intelligence analysis well is a real professional skill, and it should have a professional career attached to it, which isn't really the case in the Canadian federal government system at the moment, though there have been many ef

Public Safety committee  You may have provided your own answer to the question. The CCLA has taken this approach to a number of pieces of national security legislation, arguing that a specific reference to the charter should always be built in. I can see its symbolic value. I also think, in strictly stat

Public Safety committee  I think I would just reference the fact that the government has been working on a complaints mechanism for CBSA. From my personal perspective, for what it's worth, I would give them time to work that out. They have consulted with outside experts and so on about how that might wor

Public Safety committee  Yes. It would be a crosscutting provision. It's really a timing matter, in a way. I think legitimately it should be in Bill C-59 and then referenced back to Bill C-21 in terms of coming-into-force provisions. Probably you folks around the table are more expert than I would be on

Public Safety committee  Okay. It's very difficult, because generally, up until very recently, we haven't seen such timelines. Governments of various stripes have been very reluctant to do this. They prefer the flexibility of having non-public retention schedules. It's often treated as a national securi

Public Safety committee  I think that would be a matter of experience. I take your point. My argument would be, hypothetically, that the most serious ways in which entry or exit information might be used probably bear on national security matters, although not always. It could be human smuggling and chil

Public Safety committee  Absolutely. We're seeing this come forward, and I again refer to Bill C-59, which isn't yet before the committee, and some other aspects around CSIS data analytics and so on. I think this is crucial for public confidence. It's crucial for the organization of CBSA itself. I think

Public Safety committee  I think all you would need in the legislation is a requirement for an annual report to Parliament. Then Parliament, on the basis of annual reports, could decide how satisfied or not they were with them. I think the main substance of such a report would partly be statistical—what

Public Safety committee  It's a good question. There is some publicly available information, particularly around the first phase of the rollout of entry-exit, where they were wanting to test how well they could digest relatively limited flows of information from the United States. There was statistical d

Public Safety committee  So far so good, it would seem.

Public Safety committee  No, Mr. Dubé. It would clarify it in two particular ways. It would clarify that the minister would be responsible for any sharing arrangements that were undertaken using this data coming in to CBSA with other federal government departments. That would obviously intersect a bit wi

Public Safety committee  The short answer to that is absolutely. It seems to me it would fit nicely under the current government's transparency commitments. As you know, in Bill C-59 there are a variety of statutory requirements for agencies to provide public reports, and in some cases unprecedented publ

Public Safety committee  Monsieur Dubé, I would say that internal resolution mechanisms may be helpful but are always inadequate, so there is a need for independent handling of complaints, and there has to be a triage process to make sure that those complaints are serious. That can be built into the law.

Public Safety committee  That's correct, although national security, as you'll know, Mr. Dubé, is not defined anywhere in the law, so the definition could be stretched or compacted, depending on the need. Bill C-59 doesn't specifically indicate that CBSA, as one of the principal security and intelligen