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Harper’s national security advisor downplays C-51 concerns

Harper’s national security advisor downplays C-51 concerns

What keeps the prime minister’s national security advisor up at night? Well, when Richard Fadden was the director of CSIS, one thing in particular.

“One of the things that, honestly — and perhaps figuratively sometimes, directly sometimes my wife would tell you — kept me awake at night, was the thought that if something terrible happened, and we found out two days later, that the government of Canada had information that could have prevented this,” Fadden said Monday afternoon.

“I could not have explained that to my minister.”

Fadden was appearing for the first time in front of a Senate committee Monday as Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s national security advisor, testifying before members about the Conservative government’s anti-terror legislation.

“I don’t think I could have explained that to you,” he said to committee members.

In an attempt to downplay and abate concerns over the bill — of which there are many — Fadden had laudable things to say about the legislation, including the sharing of information portion of C-51, and told the tale above as an example of why he is behind the legislation.

The bill will allow for government departments to pass on information to 17 federal institutions — those institutions now can share information among themselves — when the information is “relevant” to national security purposes.

“The sharing of information act, I think, is not doing anything more than saying to public servants, broadly defined, if you have information that may help the national security agencies to deal with these threats,” Fadden said.

“I think this is all necessary, because as you all know from having had people from various partners and agencies in front of you, all of these agencies develop their own culture, and ways of doing things,” he continued. “It’s not that easy to share all the time.”

Bill C-51 is still, technically, in the House of Commons but the Senate national security committee is in the middle of a pre-study, before the bill lands in senators’ hands, and have heard from witnesses including Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney, Justice Minister Peter MacKay, professor Craig Forcese and Canada’s privacy commissioner, Daniel Therrien.

Therrien, though, had some warnings about Bill C-51 last week.

Many critics are concerned about the bill’s impact on Canadians’ privacy rights. Therrien told the committee Thursday afternoon that the legislation will strain his offices resources and that the breadth and parameters of information sharing within the bill is too broad.

Another concern with Bill C-51 is around a lack of parliamentary oversight to keep tabs on the enhanced powers the legislation gives to Canada’s spy agencies.

CSIS oversight was a recommendation put forward by former prime ministers Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, Joe Clark and John Turner as well as numerous academics, court justices and past members of the Security and Intelligence Review Committee.

The former prime ministers warned in a joint statement in February that abuses to human rights in the name of national security and public safety “can go undetected without remedy.”

Fadden, again, tried to downplay the worries that CSIS won’t get proper oversight.

“I would remind that you know under our system of government, all of the agencies here represented have a minister of the crown, and under our system they are accountable to that minister, who is accountable to you,” he said to the senators.

“And I find it interesting that in this debate about oversight and review, to sort of ignore the responsibility of ministers,” Fadden said.

“I must say, when I was director of CSIS, I never considered my minister to be a rubber stamp. I would say with the SIRC, with the CSEC commissioner, with ministers, and a somewhat more developed role for the federal court, there’s a fair bit of review being done already.”