Good morning, Chair and members of the committee. It's an honour to join you today and to have the opportunity to discuss Bill C-377.

We hope to provide some insight to this committee on government security screening processes and policies, as well as on access to classified information and the importance of protecting it.

In the interest of time, as the chair mentioned, I have the honour of providing opening remarks on behalf of the entire panel of witnesses.

Security screening is a fundamental practice that makes it possible to establish and maintain a relationship of trust within the government, between the government and Canadians, and between Canada and foreign countries.

Security screening involves the collection of personal information from individuals with their informed consent, as well as information from law enforcement, intelligence sources and other sources, using methods to assess their reliability and loyalty to Canada. My colleagues here from TBS and PCO will be very pleased to expand upon these issues.

A security clearance is sometimes misunderstood or portrayed as a special designation, a set of privileges or an earned qualification like a rank. It is none of these. Simply put, in the Government of Canada, it is an administrative decision taken by the deputy head of an organization that an individual is an acceptable security risk when accessing government information, assets and facilities, and when working with others in government.

The deputy head makes their decision based on the information and advice provided by the police and intelligence services, including the RCMP and CSIS. A security clearance may be granted, denied or revoked by the deputy head at any time.

Since clearance holders work in every part of government, a security clearance does not automatically grant the holder access to all information or assets at that level of clearance.

Safeguarding sensitive information is critical to the Government of Canada's ability to function and to keep Canada and Canadians safe. There are rigorous measures in place to prevent the release of classified information to anyone who does not strictly require it.

These measures are imposed with very good reason. The inadvertent release of sensitive information can result—and, very sadly, has resulted—in serious harm to individuals, even costing lives, Canada's national interest and our international relations. Mitigating this risk underpins everything that members of the security and intelligence community do. The release of information could mean risking the safety of human sources, exposing the tradecraft and other methodologies used to conduct investigations, and threatening the stability of indispensable allied relationships upon which Canada depends so heavily for intelligence. Put simply, if partners cannot trust Canada with their information, they will no longer provide it to us.

Similarly, if human sources do not trust that CSIS can protect them by safeguarding the information that they provide to us, our ability to recruit sources and collect information vital to Canadian security will be seriously impeded. We could also lose access to a valuable technical collection source that took years and expensive investments to develop.

What may appear in the first instance as information that's not especially sensitive or harmful, when viewed in conjunction with other publicly released information, can be used by adversaries to make inferences with very serious consequences. This is called the mosaic effect. Our adversaries carefully watch and track every word we say and release publicly, and we're very confident that they are watching now. They put together many pieces of information to identify our sources, our methodologies, our tradecraft and intelligence gaps. Many adversaries are very good at their jobs.

There are important principles that reinforce this system and that lie at the foundation of safeguarding all sensitive information. This is the need-to-know principle. An individual's specific duties and functions and the files they were working on at that particular moment in time are what establish their need to know for relevant sensitive information. Even the most senior officials at CSIS, who have the highest possible clearance levels, do not receive sensitive information that is not relevant to the current job and files that they're working on. In other words, there is no deemed need to know.

We need to ensure that sufficient information is disclosed to hold the government to account while also ensuring that classified information is protected. There are several critical avenues for review and oversight of classified information, including the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, the National Security Intelligence Review Agency, the intelligence commissioner and the Federal Court, among others.

The people who work for these organizations have the necessary security clearances; they will receive the information classified as secret that they need for performing their specific jobs.

There are safeguards in place to ensure that no national security injury occurs as a result of disclosure of that information. These individuals are bound to secrecy under the foreign interference and security of information act, formerly known as the Security of Information Act, SOIA, and they must not knowingly disclose any information they obtained or to which they had access in the course of their duties and that a department is taking measures to protect.

At the same time, CSIS is making efforts to enhance its transparency, including in its public annual reports, which now say more than ever about its operations and the threat overview, and in its discussions with the media and the information it communicates to the public proactively.

We have taken extensive efforts to “write for release” information, for example in the proactive provision of chronologies of events to parliamentary committees. We've done that in the last couple of months.

Recent amendments to the CSIS Act through Bill C-70 further enhance CSIS's ability to share information, and we look forward to working more closely with parliamentarians as we up the national security conversation in this country.

We will be happy to answer your questions.

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