Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes. The short answer is, yes, if it's available. We've seen evidence that, particularly with people who originally travelled to western countries like Canada, in this instance, with the intent of at some point carrying out a terrorist attack, they don't care how they get there.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, it is very fair. In fact, the governments of those countries where they originally come from are aware of that. This has been a pattern since the end of the 1980s, after the Soviet war in Afghanistan when the mujahideen felt they'd defeated the Soviet Union—now what do they do?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  There are several things I'd like to highlight. One is that a number of principles need to be embodied in whatever effective asylum laws are put in place. Chief amongst those principles is the balance between security, accountability, openness, and fairness. Certainly, the stories of those who see Canada as a refuge, who have faced persecution for a variety of reasons, are heartbreaking at times.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's close. It's coming close to nine o'clock.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  You wouldn't know it, but the weather is not quite so nice here.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. Mr. Chair, honourable members, I am privileged to speak to you today. Thank you for having me back and thank you for the opportunity to provide some comments on the bill at hand, Bill C-31. I have studied extensively the phenomenon of homegrown terrorism in the West.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  You mean pre-screening in the sense of applying for visas at a consulate abroad?

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I think it probably has to be a systematic process. To be frank, there are going to be exceptions. There are going to be people who aren't allowed entry, say, on their first look. There's an important role for an appeals process because of that. There unfortunately has to be a balance between not letting in everybody who ought to be let in and keeping out those people who truly would do Canada harm.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Again, I'm not an immigration law expert or a border control technical expert, but in terms of principles, I think it should inform effective and secure immigration policy. The third one is enacting immigration and border control policies that form a mutually supportive relationship with the work of law enforcement agencies at all levels and across the government to provide a maximum degree of security against the threat of terrorism.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Thank you. Racial profiling is obviously a touchy subject in a variety of areas and for a variety of reasons, and to some extent it's problematic. A policy that embraces racial profiling too closely, or hews too closely to a strict racial profiling line, runs the risk of blinding you, say, to dangers that don't fit that mould.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Well, they are considerable difficulties. The point I would make, as I mentioned, is it wasn't until after the 2003 plot in which a number of individuals.... The convicted ring leader was an Algerian who was found to be living in the country illegally. He had an asylum application rejected and then they lost track of him.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, I can. Fundamentally, what it comes down to is providing an accessible means of legally crossing the border. As long as that can be done, the appeal of crossing the border illegally will be dramatically diminished. Doing so by incorporating, let's say, metric scans or other security measures but doing that in ways that aren't deemed to be too intrusive will, as I said, encourage such legal border crossings.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I mentioned three broad principles that I think should inform any truly effective and secure immigration policy. One of them is that the law should facilitate maximum awareness of not only who is entering the country, but, and this is critical, of who is travelling between Canada and those regions of the world with which terrorism dangers, as I said, are most closely associated.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  It's an excellent question. There certainly are examples of individuals moving from various countries in the world to Latin America. There has been considerable attention paid to the threat of terrorist groups exploiting the U.S.'s relatively porous southern border. But I think it's important to keep in mind that as porous as that border is, and as much as it is the source of the majority of illegal immigration into the U.S., the northern border is much longer and is watched over with considerably less manpower and resources, both on the Canadian side and on the American side.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  The short answer is yes. You're exactly right that there has to be a balance between security and transparency and all the fundamental principles free societies are based on. The difficulty arises in that.... I mentioned in the U.K., for instance, there's an over-representation of ties to Pakistan in virtually every way with respect to their homegrown terrorism threats.