A foreign intelligence mandate for Canada’s spy service may help the country plot its own course amid an increasingly choppy geopolitical climate and an increasingly unreliable America, national security experts say.
The Liberal government has strongly hinted that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) will be getting an expanded mission alongside $6 billion in new funding over the next decade, and there is growing speculation among national security experts that role could focus ongathering information from foreign nationals abroad to feed back to Ottawa.
Canada relies heavily on security partners — especially the U.S. — for much of its foreign intelligence needs. CSIS has a limited ability to collect intelligence globally, but that information must be related to threats to Canadian security.
Successive Canadian governments have viewed that situation as good enough, and balked at the suggestion — and cost — of setting up a foreign intelligence service akin to the U.K.’s MI6 or the U.S. CIA.
But with the U.S. becoming a dubious economic and security partner under President Donald Trump’s administration, experts told Global News Canada’s reliance on America for intelligence is a questionable strategy.
“We are pursuing our own sovereign interests in a way that the government has not in the past, where our interests in trade, who we might partner with … we’re pursuing very much our own interests, as opposed to the interests of the United States and we’re tagging along,” said Leah West, a national security law professor at Carleton University.
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“So as we’re looking to (invest) and partner with foreign countries on defence, and technology, and critical minerals in a way that we didn’t before, we need to have a good sense of what’s happening on the ground in those countries, with those governments, with those companies. So there is a need for greater foreign intelligence.”
CSIS was created in the 1980s after allegations of serious misconduct were levelled against the RCMP’s intelligence branch, leading to the federal McDonald Commission. That independent probe recommended splitting law enforcement and intelligence gathering into two different agencies.
The report also strongly cautioned, however, against giving the newly formed CSIS a foreign intelligence mandate. Foreign intelligence agencies routinely violate the law of other countries, and the commission worried about that “contagion” reaching domestic security investigations.
Domestic and foreign intelligence agencies collect different kinds of information, with domestic agencies focused more on security threats than issues like economic intelligence.
The McDonald Commission also expressed concerns about creating a “security and intelligence monolith in a democratic state” — giving one agency responsibility for both domestic and foreign intelligence.
West noted that the commission was writing in the early 1980s in a very different world, and that political oversight and public scrutiny over intelligence agencies’ activities is much stronger now than it was 40 years ago.
“Those criticisms arise from a very different era, when there wasn’t a lot of legal constraint and required reporting and transparency built into the mandates of our spy services,” West said.
Wesley Wark, a longtime national security observer and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, said there remain crucial roles for “human” intelligence even with the advent of invasive surveillance technology and digital spying.
“You can’t take a spy satellite image of what a foreign leader is thinking about (an issue). And very often you won’t be able to use signals intelligence to give you a clear picture of that,” Wark said in a recent interview.
“(Human intelligence) is very much a business of trying to tap into human knowledge about adversary state plans and potentialities. And the gold mine is being able to have sources of information that are close to decision makers, who are in the know, in a foreign state.”
Wark added that a foreign intelligence capability could augment other, more modern types of intelligence gathering. For instance, having “a close ear on the ground” in a foreign state could help the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) determine who to target for electronic surveillance, or help identify important facilities to keep watch using spy satellites.
But Wark said the current government might be most interested in intelligence that can inform its trade agenda.
“One of the clear indications we have from the prime minister on his outlook on the world is that … Mark Carney is very interested in economic intelligence,” Wark said.
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