Information & Ethics committee  Well, there's the issue of review. I think a unifying theme in all three of our testimonies is that you really need to look at information sharing in light of the adequacy of review. There are no perfect legal fixes here, but as I said, I think there may be a process fix that all

Information & Ethics committee  The volunteering under section 5 takes us back to “subject to any provision of any other Act of Parliament, or of any other regulation made under such an Act, that prohibits or restricts the disclosure of information”, so I guess it would depend upon that, although certainly if y

Information & Ethics committee  Generally, SIRC has not had powers to implement its recommendations. It makes recommendations, and the minister responsible responds to them. This is part of the sometimes confused distinction between review and oversight.

Information & Ethics committee  I think that unless an exception is made because of privacy interests, probably the power probably ultimately has to reside with the minister.

Information & Ethics committee  I agree with what both of my colleagues have said, but I would point out that even with the green paper, one of the things that we have to guard against is siloing these different areas. We have a whole-of-government approach to security, which I think is understandable, given th

Information & Ethics committee  In echoing that, I would add that no legal language is going to be perfect, but that's where the issue of integrated review comes in. I would hope that here a solution from the ground up would match information sharing with review, which I take to be the underlying principle that

Information & Ethics committee  Nothing in the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act requires CSIS, or indeed any other agency, to share information. This is a permissive regime. Without getting to the organizational, cultural, and legal difficulties that Professor Forcese has talked about, this is not goi

Information & Ethics committee  The closest in this act would be section 4, which provides non-enforceable guiding principles. As I said in my original statement, it does not address the issue of the reliability of the information, which I think is what you are getting at with the reference to “garbage in, garb

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, that's true, but what I would say is we already have a “greater certainty” provision in section 6, which says, “For greater certainty, the use and further disclosure, other than under this Act,”—

Information & Ethics committee  —and it hasn't exactly increased certainty, because Professor Forcese and I were a bit baffled and surprised when we read the green paper. This goes back to the fact that this act has been so poorly drafted that we need a more fundamental reworking of it.

Information & Ethics committee  If that's addressed to me, obviously the Privacy Commissioner needs and has said that he needs more powers. One of the reasons we mentioned dedicated national security review is that, particularly with the foreign information sharing and also with the evolving nature of security

Information & Ethics committee  I guess my understanding of “detection, identification, analysis, prevention, investigation or disruption” is that they're trying to include every possible activity that at least the 17 recipient institutions engage in. Perhaps with the change to necessity and proportionality, th

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much for the question. I think this is an area that we should probably just leave to the courts, and I would favour simply deleting section 9 of SCISA. The Supreme Court is now developing jurisprudence with respect to charter damages, which would include damages f

Information & Ethics committee  As I said in my opening comments, and also with Justice Major's recommendations, I agree about mandatory sharing, about intelligence, and about possible terrorism offences. That would be an example of a mandatory requirement as opposed to the permissive requirement, but it's a mu

Information & Ethics committee  As Ms. Pillay has said, information sharing is a modern reality. We should participate in it, but we need checks and balances in the form of an adequate review structure. Although the Privacy Commissioner obviously has some role here, if we had a dedicated national security revie