Stronger oversight, safer country
Since the Tories brought out their proposed anti-terrorism bill, C-51, critics have taken the government to task for what is perceived to be lax oversight of Canada’s spy agencies: the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), a smaller organization that collects electronic data through communications monitoring and intercepts. These critics, including more than a few members of the opposition, worry that Canada is ramping up its clandestine services without a corresponding boost to our oversight mechanisms.
Canada does not have permanent parliamentary oversight of its intelligence agencies, as is the case in the United States and United Kingdom. Oversight is instead provided by the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), composed of a handful of government appointees plus a small staff. Five members and fewer than 20 staffers seems inadequate for such an important job — even if the Tories had not left many positions unfilled, in some cases for months at a time. Building up SIRC’s resources in line with the growing scale of operations at CSIS and CSE is the very least that should be done.
SIRC is not the only line of defence against abuses, of course. In a recent newspaper article, Ron Atkey, a national security professor at the University of Toronto and SIRC’s first chair, laid out the many ways our intelligence agencies are constrained. Judges must issue warrants before many operations, while special advocates can be brought in to assist in that process in particularly complex cases. SIRC members themselves (aside from members of Parliament) must be vetted by opposition leaders before being appointed.
Still, a standing, multi-party committee within the House of Commons would be a welcome addition to the processes already in place to oversee our spies. Though Canadians have long been blessed to live in a peaceful part of the world, the fact is that our country does have enemies. Yet Canada’s intelligence and national defence communities are very small clubs indeed. The Canadian public has too long had the luxury of being poorly informed on matters relating to national security, and those we elect are often no better informed.
That should change. A permanent intelligence review committee within the House of Commons would not just provide better oversight for our spies, with the unique legitimacy elected representatives bring to the task. It would also expose members of all parties to the realities of the threats facing Canada and how our security officials meet them. In virtually all cases, across every party, this would be the first real exposure MPs would have to the day-to-day reality of keeping Canada safe.
Such a committee would require extra screening and security clearances, of course. And its members would have to be sworn to secrecy on certain sensitive files. But Canadians would be better informed on national security and intelligence matters if MPs were better informed — and they’d be much better served if, opposition MPs having been taken into the government’s confidence, some of the partisanship were taken out of critical decisions about our collective safety. For this reason alone, the creation of an oversight committee within the House of Commons is an idea worth serious consideration.