Public Safety committee  Yes. I think a real-time oversight is really impractical. Can you imagine if you're running a police investigation and you have a parliamentarian saying to you, “Well, why don't you go get a search warrant?” In the meantime, you're trying to investigate a case. I just think it's

Public Safety committee  In terms of the RCMP, there are any number of cases. We just had this whole problem, I suppose, of the settlement coming out of the sexual harassment. Also, there are other instances in which the RCMP has had difficulty. I think there wasn't one particular instance, but a genera

Public Safety committee  I don't know of any metric by which you're going to do it. Pollsters are routinely getting everything wrong, so I don't think they're the answer. I would say, though, that there is a concern. If there have been spectacular, publicly renowned instances of problems with the agencie

Public Safety committee  Agencies around the world treat this very differently. If the committee were to release a report about the threat level, I think it would have to be with the co-operation of the intelligence agencies involved, because they're the ones who will appreciate the extent to which risk

Public Safety committee  Yes. I'm firmly of the view that the committee ought to have powers of compulsion. If there are particular pieces of information that you want to get from any one agency, hopefully they'll co-operate and give it to you, but on the off chance that they don't, for some reason, or i

Public Safety committee  Yes, I agree entirely with Luc. Look, I've done a lot of this work, and the identity of the informant, almost nine times out of ten, is irrelevant. What's important is what information was provided and how the agency dealt with that particular person. Their name has very little

Public Safety committee  It's a controversial topic. From an intelligence perspective, you may or you may not want the threat level known.

Public Safety committee  No, it's the opposite. If you as a committee member want to look at something as part of your mandate, you ought to be able to. It's not that the minister is going to misconduct himself or herself. It's that you ought to have access.

Public Safety committee  Right. Well, I mean, I don't know if they'll be doing it that way or not. We know from past experience that ministers aren't shy to claim privilege.

Public Safety committee  I guess I would say that discretion in the minister to withhold information from the committee is corrosive to the review process, and the minister just ought not have that discretion except for the very limited circumstance that I have indicated, keeping in mind that the informa

Public Safety committee  I just don't see the case for withholding information.

Public Safety committee  I'd say it would be a current ongoing investigation where production to the committee could prejudice the investigation. You might want to tie it to the resources of the agencies, because that's really the problem here. When you're in the middle of an operation—and certainly Luc

Public Safety committee  I agree with Luc that there has to be this cross-agency review. That's the beauty of this particular committee. If the committee were minded to take a look at information sharing across the suite of intelligence agencies, they would have to do so with regard to their capacity, bu

Public Safety committee  Do you mean in terms of...?

Public Safety committee  I don't have a strong view on that one way or the other. I suppose the benefit of having the chair elected is that the person has the confidence of the committee members and isn't someone who is parachuted in, but you guys all know each other and like each other, so....