First, I want to immensely thank this committee for taking the time to visit Toronto. It's been a very long time since I've seen the committee in Toronto. In fact, I haven't seen the committee in Toronto, so thank you very much, members. This is a very important issue.
I'll say a bit about me. I've done public interest research for 30 years. The last four of those have focused almost exclusively on security research. Before I continue, honourable members, I would like you to meet my 81-year-old mother. Her name is Elizabeth Ernst, and she will be sending in a written submission that will likely appall every last one of you. We don't have the time to talk about that during my presentation right now.
To get right to the meat of the matter, I'm the founder of the National Security Oversight Institute of Canada. The research I do would nourish this committee, frankly, on issues germane to the matters it seeks input about from civil society. I've been studying the issue for years. I've written reports about the extrajudicial practices, including disruption, so please consider calling me as a witness for any further hearings that are going on in Ottawa.
Here's the one big issue. I brought up this issue in a post about the introduction of Bill C-51 on January 30, 2015, almost immediately after that, and I'll tell you exactly what this issue is. This is an access to information document I obtained and that I then circulated to quite a few MPs and members of the media. It was even covered in the Toronto Star. This report is referenced in the backgrounder to the green paper.
On page 21, it's referenced, but not by name. If you go four paragraphs down, you'll see that it says, “A 2010 report by SIRC recommended that CSIS seek guidance and direction on the issue of threat reduction.” Here's that report. That mischaracterizes what this report is all about. Even the title of the report betrays what the report is about. The title of the report is “CSIS's Use of Disruption To Counter National Security Threats”. It's SIRC study number 2009-05. I was able to ATIP it from SIRC, because of course you can't get anything from CSIS.
In this report, members, it very clearly indicated that disruption was taking place in Canada long before Bill C-51, and CSIS was involved in that disruption. In fact, CSIS was doing disruption. It's maddening for me to listen to certainly not this process but some of the witness testimony that comes before members such as yourselves in Ottawa from people who represent that CSIS has just begun this process of disruption, post- Bill C-51. That is utterly false.