Information & Ethics committee  Does Kent want to respond?

Information & Ethics committee  No, they're not definitions. The definitions that apply to section 2...well, they have a definition of the people of Canada, which, if you read it, is itself extremely broad and somewhat uncertain, so “people of Canada” means the people in Canada. Could that be one person, or doe

Information & Ethics committee  Perhaps Kent should speak to this, but for section 2 we essentially said to get rid of this novel concept of “activity that undermines the security of Canada”. Use the better-understood concept of “threats to the security of Canada” from the CSIS Act, as adjusted to accommodate,

Information & Ethics committee  There is a discussion quite often about review versus oversight. There is some confusion about the terms, but in Canadian practice, oversight means command, control, and coordination. The oversight entity authorizes or has a role in authorizing activities. Review is looking at

Information & Ethics committee  This is an area of some confusion. I mentioned briefly a few moments ago that there is a lot of uncertainty in this area as to how various statutory rules are being construed by the government. One area of uncertainty is over the practice of what's known as deminimization. CSE,

Information & Ethics committee  Well, I think it depends on who you ask. SIRC of course has grown in terms of its budget and staffing in response to the new CSIS powers to do threat reduction and now CSIS's operations overseas. At the end of the day, any kind of review body is going to be a partial audit. You'r

Information & Ethics committee  I'll start, and then Kent can jump in. The Wakeling case involved information shared by the RCMP to American authorities under what's known as part VI of the Criminal Code, which is the wiretapping provision. It was a lawfully gathered wiretap that complied with the charter, and

Information & Ethics committee  I'm going to duck the first question, about why it happened, because that would require me to make a political judgment, and I'm no more qualified than anyone on the street to make that political judgment. The honest answer is that I don't know why it happened. There are probably

Information & Ethics committee  I think the situation right now is quite confused. Section 5 of the new act says that it's subject to other existing acts that constrain or control the disclosure of information, which would suggest the Privacy Act. The Privacy Act itself has an exception saying that where some o

Information & Ethics committee  I understand the government's view, which was taken during the Bill C-51 debates, that the new act doesn't authorize new collection, but it depends how you measure collection. Sufficiently broad information sharing allows for the pooling of information within the hands of one age

Information & Ethics committee  I would be more surgical in terms of the analogy to blowing up Bill C-51. I think there are aspects of Bill C-51 that don't stand either a constitutional or a reasonableness test. The new speech crime of promotion and advocacy “of terrorism offences in general” is so sweeping t

Information & Ethics committee  In the interest of full disclosure, Professor Roach and I are doing a doubleheader today. We're up in front of the standing committee on Bill C-22. Those thoughts are in the can, so to speak. I would say that Bill C-22 provides a necessary remedy: that is, investing parliamentar

Information & Ethics committee  That's a hard question, because it means going through a lot of statutes, and it's a lot of work. I would be hoping that the Department of Justice would help. I'll give you an example within the context of the concept of terrorism, which obviously is a pertinent one for this con

Information & Ethics committee  I'll take a stab at that, because I know that Ms. Pillay is going to have a view as well. I think Prof. Roach and I would be in the camp of those saying that Bill C-51 was trying to address real problems but, as I've suggested, overreacted in some respects and underreacted in ot

Information & Ethics committee  The honest answer to that is that we don't know. We have never had an accounting of the events of that day, other than some redacted reports from the police as to the security situation on the Hill. That can be juxtaposed with the Australian response to a similar incident in Dece