I guess, ultimately, for me, the purpose is getting Canada up to speed with provisions that many of our allies already have, which they have used successfully for years, or in some cases, for decades, especially in Europe.

My persistent argument is that I think we've just had our heads in the sand for too long because we've been very lucky geostrategically to be so far from all this instability. We need to learn from our allies and like-minded countries. In particular, the U.K., Germany, France and Spain have dealt with the phenomenon of terrorism and had to confront this for a longer period of time, and we can see that freedom and security are not a zero-sum game, but rather, that free societies are also secure societies. There are ways of reconciling these competing priorities to serve societal interest as a whole.

I think the ultimate purpose here is to make sure we have provisions that are commensurate with the phenomenon of the globalization of transnational terrorism, on the one hand, but that on the other hand, are sufficiently nuanced to respond to our constitutional and charter environment while effectively providing a more nuanced tool kit, especially for our law enforcement and security and intelligence agencies.

If we simply rely upon criminal pre-emption as the main tool, which is sometimes what the critics will say—that criminal pre-emption is essentially a national security investigation with the objective of ultimately laying a charge—it is very expensive. It is cumbersome.

We've had the commissioner of the RCMP come before Parliament and say that it's breaking his organization to run the investigations he's currently running. The standard of evidence to obtain a conviction is very high. It's not just about laying a charge. It's about making sure we collect the evidence, with the crown having sufficient confidence that they'll actually be able to obtain a conviction.

In the case of youth, do we necessarily want these individuals to end up with a criminal record as a result of what they did, or do we just want to make sure that we take the necessary pre-emptive measures so that they are not able to follow through, and so that, hopefully, with some appropriate intervention—and I think there's a lot more that we can do on the intervention and the prevention side—they will come to their senses and understand that this was perhaps not the best decision to make?

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