Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government is revealing few details about the plans for a massive $6 billion budget boost to Canada’s domestic spy agency.
The new funding for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), to be doled out over the next decade, came as a surprise to national security watchers in Thursday’s federal budget.
The budget documents devoted a few short sentences to how the biggest cash injection in the agency’s history will be used, other than it will allow CSIS to better “engage” Canadians and protect against threats like terrorism, foreign interference and espionage.
Both CSIS and Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree deferred questions about the budget plans to Finance Canada. In response to Global News questions, Finance Canada spokesperson David Barnabe sent an email restating the language from Thursday’s budget documents.
The size of budget boost, coupled with the sparse details provided by the government, fueled speculation among national security researchers about whether the money could be used to create a foreign intelligence gathering branch within CSIS, a longstanding topic of debate among Canada’s intelligence community.
Stephanie Carvin, a professor at the Norman Paterson School for International Affairs at Carleton University and a former CSIS analyst, said that both the National Security Strategy and the significant boost to the agency’s resources suggest the government is planning some foreign intelligence “capability.”
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Carvin also pointed to comments Friday from Dominic Rochon, a top national security official in the Privy Council, who suggested the government was planning legislative changes to the CSIS Act.
“All of this suggests, at the very least, the creation of a foreign human intelligence capability, probably within an existing agency like CSIS,” Carvin said.
Currently, the agency is limited in what intelligence it can gather abroad and instead focuses more narrowly on Canada. CSIS largely cannot recruit human sources abroad to gain insight into foreign governments’ plans, and Canada does not have a dedicated foreign intelligence agency like most close allies do — think MI6 in the U.K., or the CIA in the U.S.
That needs to change, according to longtime intelligence researcher Wesley Wark, who said he believed serious discussions are taking place within government about creating a foreign human intelligence capability.
“It may strike some people as odd in this world of high tech that you would go back to this kind of classic model of intelligence collection, but the reality is that almost all of our allies that run such agencies continue to say that it is an important methodology,” Wark said in an interview Friday.
“I think … undoubtedly it’s being given serious consideration. I think the chances of the decision being taken that would be favourable to some kind of startup are certainly greater than 50 per cent, now, and that’s a higher proportion than its ever been certainly in my lifetime.”
Wark agreed that many of the senior intelligence officials who would be advising Carney on the idea would likely be warm to the idea of Canada having its own foreign intelligence capabilities.
David Morrison, the deputy secretary to cabinet for national security and intelligence, is the former deputy minister of Global Affairs Canada. CSIS Director Daniel Rogers also has a background in foreign intelligence, having served as a senior official at the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) responsible for signals intelligence collection.
One line within the budget does suggest Carney’s government wants to reduce the reliance on foreign intelligence provided by allies like the U.S.
Canada is a member of the Five Eyes security alliance, which includes the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand. Among allied nations, Canada is a net importer of intelligence — meaning it receives more intelligence from partners than it collects and shares.
In the government’s recently released National Security Strategy, Carney repeatedly stressed the need for “sovereign” capabilities to reduce Canada’s reliance on intelligence garnered from allies.
The “rupture” represented by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to the Canada-U.S. relationship is not explicitly mentioned, but can be read between the prime minister’s lines.
“The long-held belief that the combination of our geography, interconnectedness, and a rules-based international order could substitute for Canadian sovereign capacity to protect ourselves is no longer tenable,” Carney’s introduction to the strategy reads.
“Once distant threats are now proximate and immediate. The global order that long protected our sovereignty has ruptured. We are prepared to protect Canada’s sovereignty, and when it is threatened, we will act.”
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