Federal spy watchdog facing job cuts over lack of funding
Agency reviews lawfulness of CSIS actions
• The federal watchdog that triggered this week’s scathing judicial rebuke of Canada’s spy service for illegal activities faces significant job cuts because of a chronic lack of sustained government funding, even as the Liberals hinted Friday the agency could be asked to do more to police federal spies.
The Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), the independent agency that reports to Parliament on the operations of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), says the equivalent of at least 11 full-time positions will disappear March 31 unless the Liberal government delivers millions more dollars under a sustained, multi-year funding plan announced by the previous Conservative government.
“We don’t know if we’re getting any more funding,” SIRC spokeswoman Sabrine Barakat said Friday. “SIRC has been actively working to access that money on a permanent basis but we’re still waiting to see.” The government has offered no explanation, she said.
The office of Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale was unable Friday to explain the funding confusion. Treasury Board officials could not explain either when asked the same question by the Ottawa Citizen last March.
Potential staffing cuts are expected to primarily hit high-value subject-matter experts and analysts who review the lawfulness of CSIS operations. It may also reduce the number of SIRC lawyers handling public complaints against CSIS.
The money woes are espe- cially perplexing given the government’s stated commitment to strong national security oversight and review. Legislation to create a committee of parliamentarians to review and police the state’s expanding security intelligence apparatus is now making its way through Parliament.
Although this week’s Federal Court judgment confirms SIRC’s review system still works, it’s an increasingly lopsided match.
CSIS has a $500-million annual budget and, under the 2015 Anti-terrorism Act (formerly Bill C-51), a new licence to conduct offensive operations to disrupt suspected threats to national security and to exchange and collate information on suspect Canadians with other federal departments and agencies. ( CSIS’s original mandate restricted it to collection and analysis of intelligence to advise government.)
SIRC, meanwhile, typically operates on an annual budget of about $2.8 million, has 26 employees and cannot follow CSIS’s operational trail once it crosses into another organization, such as the RCMP, the Communications Security Establishment or Canada Border Services Agency.
“The increasing water- front of CSIS’s activities reflects directly on increased SIRC activities,” said Barakat, among the SIRC employees whose jobs could end in March. “With the expansion of (CSIS) roles and responsibilities, ours expand in tandem. (But) SIRC’s budget has not increased at the same pace that CSIS’s has.”
Widespread concern about CSIS’s new C-51 powers pressured the Harper government to effectively double SIRC’s annual operating budget in the 2015-16 federal budget. It committed to upping SIRC’s annual spending, with an additional $12.5 million over five years and $2.5 million annually thereafter.
But SIRC Friday said it has only received about $1 million of the promised money and no long- term funding commitment. (An additional $ 3 million in 2016-17 funding was provided for a planned spring moved to new offices and for information technology and information management upgrades.)
Goodale repeated the pledge for robust oversight again Friday in the swirling aftermath of the Federal Court ruling that CSIS illegally retained a decade’s worth of metadata gleaned from Canadians’ electronic communications that had nothing to do with threats to national security. Questions about the activity were first raised by SIRC in its 2014-15 annual report.
SIRC retroactively reviews eight to a dozen CSIS activities each year — metadata collection was part of the 2014 review — and reports its findings to Parliament in its annual report. A typical review requires hundreds of staff hours and takes several months.
Speaking with reporters, Goodale said the length of time it took for the decade of CSIS metadata misconduct to surface is of “critical concern.”
“The apparatus that was in place in terms of SIRC and its ability to review … that is a process that in the way it has been structured historically takes time before reports become available for Parliament or for the public,” he said. “That is one issue that we need to very carefully examine in our national security framework.”
Paul Cavalluzzo, counsel for the Maher Arar commission, said SIRC is not in a position to adequately deal with CSIS.
“CSIS is a multimilliondollar organization,” said Cavalluzzo. “SIRC is underfunded and has been historically. Its jurisdiction is siloed and that’s another problem.”
The commission of inquiry concluded Canada’s existing national security review system is inadequate in the contemporary world of national security activities.