Group says spies went too far

VANCOUVER — Canada’s security apparatus co-operated with regulators and private petroleum companies to share classified information, according to testimony contained in newly released documents that pull back the curtain on the working relationship between this country’s spy agency, the oil industry and its regulator.

More than 8,000 pages of documents — many of them heavily redacted — were released Monday by the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which has accused the Canadian Security Intelligence Service of breaking the law by exceeding its mandate and spying on Canadians who were peacefully protesting a pipeline project.

CSIS has maintained it has not acted outside of its mandate and its actions were “reasonable and necessary.”

“If CSIS claims it wasn’t tracking conservation groups in B.C., then why did they collect thousands of pages of files on groups who engaged in peaceful advocacy and protest?” asked Meghan McDermott, BCCLA staff counsel at a news conference Monday. “We encourage people to look at these documents and to decide for themselves what our spy agency was up to.”

The BCCLA made its original complaint in February 2014 to the CSIS watchdog, the Security Intelligence Review Committee. It alleged the spy agency overstepped its legal grounds to monitor environmental organizations and the Indigenous #IdleNoMore movement as they opposed the Northern Gateway pipeline project.

The watchdog rejected the complaint, but as part of its appeal to the Federal Court, the BCCLA has won the right to release testimony from its original hearing.

The committee’s report said CSIS participated in meetings with Natural Resources Canada and the private sector, including the petroleum industry, at the spy service’s headquarters, but added these briefings involved national security matters. The committee found CSIS did not share information about the environmental groups with the National Energy Board or the petroleum industry.

During one review committee hearing, a CSIS official said information volunteered by energy companies was put in a spy service database.

The watchdog concluded CSIS collected some information about peaceful anti-petroleum groups, but only incidentally in the process of investigating legitimate threats.

A CSIS witness testified the spy service “is not in the business of investigating environmentalists because they are advocating for an environmental cause, period.” Still, the review committee urged CSIS to ensure it was keeping only “strictly necessary” information, as stipulated in the law governing the spy service.