National Defence committee  As I said, you have to change the culture, because before the Snowden revelations or disclosures, nobody would talk about CSE, nobody would talk about my office, and nobody would talk—

National Defence committee  I think it is changing, honestly, yes, because they have made improvements in the last.... I can only talk about the last three years because I've been there for the last three years. They've made a lot of effort to release more information and they are releasing more information

National Defence committee  They could do better.

National Defence committee  By releasing more information and giving more explanations. I'll give you just one example. Two years ago, they didn't want to release any statistics with regard to the number of private communications that were incidentally intercepted. I put on some pressure and finally they

National Defence committee  I'm not saying it's difficult. It just means I have to convince them. Being a secret organization they're not used to releasing information. This isn't their culture, so you have to convince them that since Snowden, the world has changed. I think they realize that, but as I say

National Defence committee  Yes.

National Defence committee  Most of the time they do. They always have, except once, two years ago. They did not comply with the law.

National Defence committee  Yes, as the executive director mentioned, our reviews are based on risk analysis. By “risk” I mean the risk to compliance and the risk to the protection of the privacy of Canadians. Every year, we sit down and ask, “Based on what we know, what type of activities should we review

National Defence committee  For example, everything dealing with privacy matters, we will review yearly. We have PIF, the privacy incident file. We review that every year. When privacy is involved, we are very careful. We do all kinds of reviews with regard to privacy.

National Defence committee  That's why I talk about transparency. For the last three years, I've been pushing and pushing and pushing CSE to release more information and to give more explanations to the Canadian public about their activities. If you don't do that, it's pretty hard to maintain public trust.

National Defence committee  As you know, my mandate deals with CSE. However, I think the principle I'm talking about here, the transparency, would apply also to this new committee. I think this new committee would in my view enhance public trust. It's a good thing. It's a step forward in the right direction

National Defence committee  That's quite easy for me. I'll ask my expert to answer.

National Defence committee  We do. As I said in my opening remarks, that's the reason we exist.

National Defence committee  This is one of the reasons we exist.

National Defence committee  As I say, the Five Eyes are not supposed to spy on each other's citizens. They have arrangements. MOUs do exist in that regard between those countries. If this were to happen and I were aware of it, I would investigate it. But as I said—