Foreign Interference, Political Upheaval, Bureaucratic In-fighting, and Legislative Renewal in an Increasingly Fraught Global Security Environment
On 17 February 2023, Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper published a leaked 2021 highly-classified threat assessment by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) on foreign interference in Canada. A bombshell that landed right in the middle of both Canadian politics and Canada’s national security posture, it set off a series of events over the next two years that – by themselves – would have constituted some of the most astonishing moments witnessed in Canada’s national security history. As a political firestorm emerged around the foreign interference revelations and its intelligence aspects, however, several other issues arose similarly situated at the intersection between Canada’s politics and national security. In the space of several months, Canadians found themselves also confronting:
- a major scandal in the foreign ministry’s intelligence programme that highlighted both a continuing gap in the foreign intelligence function generally and a tangible naïveté about Canadian ‘diplomatic’ activities in hostile countries;
- a political assassination by India inside Canada that reignited long-standing fears concerning India’s covert activities in Canada and ultimately brought to light a much wider covert Indian campaign of assassinations in Canada, the US and Europe;
- the conviction of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s former intelligence chief for the illegal disclosure of highly-classified intelligence to organised crime groups, compounded by post-trial revelations that he was preparing to sell this intelligence to China – a shock to Canada’s intelligence community, and a landmark case as the first ever successful prosecution under Canada’s Security of Information Act.
In the midst of all of these events, the government quietly announced a review of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, the foundational legislation for both Canada’s national security posture and the mandate of CSIS (Canada’s equivalent of MI5). While this was initially driven by a series of concerning judicial findings in 2016 surrounding CSIS’s data exploitation programme – as well as an unresolved question of whether CSIS should “advise” (as is its mandate) provincial and municipal governments, as well as private sector entities, of threats to their security – changes to the Act were introduced in 2024 to address a wide range of issues. Finally, as if that was not enough for Canada’s citizens, politicians and bureaucrats to handle, the threats made against Canada’s sovereignty, national well-being, and continued role in the decades-old FIVE EYES (Canada, USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand) intelligence-sharing arrangement by the second Trump Administration added an existential crisis to these upheavals which have rocked the country to its core, while leading to wide-ranging calls for Canada to review its intelligence and national security posture, relationships, and functions.
Historically, Canada has benefited from – and became complacent around – being surrounded by three oceans and, to-this-point, a largely friendly superpower to the south that has extended its national security, defence and intelligence umbrella over Canada since 1945. Coupled with its place in both the FIVE EYESand NATO for wider intelligence needs, this has also been a primary reason that the major gap in Canada’s intelligence structures – a dedicated foreign covert human intelligence function – has remained unresolved for over forty years. This has left Canada, historically and almost uniquely amongst the FIVE EYES, as a net consumer of (particularly) foreign intelligence from these key relationships – and had a direct, fundamental impact on Canada’s approach to intelligence. It has also meant that intelligence issues have largely been addressed individually when they arose (including many of those outlined in this post), with few public debates for decades about Canada’s national security posture and intelligence needs strategically – including lower levels of public knowledge about national security issues and efforts, an issue also tied to the lack of a significant national security culture in Ottawa’s bureaucracy and politicians.
Thus, by early-2023, Canada was suffering from a lack of sufficient attention on a range of major risks to its national security set-up that had been building for decades; an overall ‘continental complacency’ about its national defence and security posture; and a national intelligence dispensation that was insufficient for both approaches to intelligence and security activities in the digital age and the evolving global order. Over the course of 2023-2025, the ever-growing series of issues and scandals culminated in the most seismic upheavals to Canada’s national security – especially as they became intertwined in Canadian politics and the declining popularity of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – unprecedented since the establishment of CSIS in 1984, with their reverberations continuing today.
These issues constitute the years of reckoning for Canada’s intelligence and national security dispensation, in which Canadians were forced to confront many long-known but unresolved concerns and risks in this milieu all at the same time – all of which notably preceded but are now also directly related to the threats made to Canada’s very existence in early 2025. Therefore, in the first of a two-part blog post, I will assess the recent major changes to the CSIS Act through the lens of the key issues driving them; in part II, I will assess what these changes plus the evolving global order mean for the single greatest question remaining for Canadian intelligence: the seeming lack of a formal foreign human intelligence function, in a new era of ever-increasing global instability and direct threats from its southern neighbour.
Foreign Interference, Canadian Politicking
The initial leak of the CSIS assessment in February 2023 was followed by a further, unprecedented series of leaked intelligence reports on alleged Chinese foreign interference in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 federal elections – including an opinion piece allegedly written by the leaker outlining their motivations. Over the course of 2023-24, reaction to these leaks descended into some of the most unfortunate displays of politicking over a major national security threat seen in recent years, drawing in amongst others the Prime Minister’s National Security & Intelligence Advisor, the Director of CSIS, the Minister of Public Safety, and his Chief of Staff – with the focus on the actual foreign interference threats presented by China, India and others becoming lost in this political noise.
A series of rolling inquiries were launched – an initial Prime Minister-mandated inquiry into the intelligence leaks and their characterisation both in the media and politically; a second inquiry by Parliament’s intelligence oversight body into Parliament’s implication in some of this; and ultimately the comprehensive Foreign Interference Commission of Inquiry (the Hogue Commission) into both the nature of the threat and Canada’s ability to confront it. As this Commission was getting underway in early-2024, a fourth body – the independent statutory oversight agency for Canada’s intelligence services – released its own report into the handling, sharing and characterisation of the intelligence in question, noting a number of shortcomings relating to the distribution and tracking of such intelligence reports, a significant point raised in the politicised reactions to the intelligence crisis brought about by the scandal.
In spite of different perspectives taken on the intelligence crisis, all four inquiries – including centrally the Hogue Commission’s two substantive reports on both the threat and Canada’s abilities to counter it – concluded that the intelligence community’s capabilities to combat foreign interference were under-funded, under-staffed, and under-weaponised to deal with the scale of the threat from China, Russia, Iran, India, and others. Alongside other steps, improvements to intelligence sharing and the mechanisms for briefing senior leaders were recommended – including the strong recommendation that all political leaders obtain top-secret security clearances in order to be able to receive and consider such intelligence – along with improving public understandings of the uses and limits of intelligence in order to improve national resilience to such threats.
The first recommendation hung partly on the fact that throughout the foreign interference scandal, the Conservative Party leader, Pierre Poilievre, refused to obtain a clearance for political reasons, stating that this would impede his ability to speak freely in Parliament; in reality, it would mean that he would likely gain knowledge of issues within his party that he would then be obligated to address – as well as potentially learn details that contradicted positions he took against the Trudeau government. Notably, Poilievre continued to refuse to obtain this clearance even against public opinion that he should and even after reports emerged during the recent federal election campaign that India was involved in organising support for his 2022 Conservative Party leadership bid, although there was no suggestion that Poilievre or his party were aware of this.
The political firestorm not only diverted attention from the actual threat, but also overwhelmed any focus on the other major intelligence-related matters unfolding at the same time – both high-profile ones (the foreign ministry’s intelligence scandal) and lower-profile but nevertheless significant ones (the changes to the CSIS Act and their implications, discussed below). These events have clearly shown the level of threat Western democracies face from foreign interference and its effects, the difficult place intelligence and its creators face in achieving the necessary impact in the face of the politics around such interference, and the significant challenges national security institutions face to effectively address all of this. The Hogue Commission recommendations are now awaiting take-up by the new government; whether they will be given the focus they require remains to be seen, but the fact that threats to Canada’s sovereignty and its national defence were central to debates and public discourse in Canada’s April 2025 election – with the now-victorious Liberals promising a national security review – provides hope that they will be.
Enhancing Canada’s National Security Intelligence Foundation
While the above unfolded, the government introduced a range of updates to the CSIS Act – building on significant ones introduced in 2015 and 2019 – that were aimed at addressing a number of issues arising around CSIS’s activities in support of its mandate; taken all together, these changes fundamentally enhanced CSIS’s mandate and operational tools. While this should have been major news by itself, it was largely lost in the foreign interference scandal – which also prevented many of these changes being tied directly to the foreign ministry’s intelligence scandal and its continued highlighting of the ambiguity surrounding Canada’s foreign intelligence pursuits, which the second part of this post will discuss.
Since 1984, CSIS’s primary mandate has been to collect intelligence on national security threats to Canada, assess these, and advise the Federal Government on their implications for policy, strategy and operations. Those national security threats are defined in Section 2 of the CSIS Act, while CSIS’s responsibilities are defined in section 12. In 2015, the Anti-Terrorism Act added the ability for CSIS to conduct “threat reduction activities”, notably both within and outside of Canada; these powers could be used when the Service had “reasonable grounds to believe” that an activity constitutes a threat to Canada, as opposed to its wider mandate which required only “reasonable grounds to suspect” to operate its authorities. This was a major change from the Service’s previously more limited “collect and advise” mandate.
The next year, however, witnessed a fundamental disruption to one of CSIS’s major intelligence tools: its use of bulk data to enrich existing collection and develop new intelligence. In its 2016 annual review of the Service, its oversight Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) noted the “data management and exploitation activities” carried out by CSIS lacked an effective governance framework to ensure that all large datasets acquired by the Service were collected and retained only under the “strictly necessary” threshold defined in legislation – and recommended it halt all such usage until this framework was implemented. CSIS immediately did so – but within weeks, this led to a Federal Court ruling that concluded CSIS’s retention of specific bulk datasets were “illegal” and that it had “failed in its duty of candour” to the courts concerning its data exploitation activities. The ruling, however, mixed characterisations of open-source collection and warranted collection (the latter governed in statute while the former is not) around the issue, and admitted that the understandings of the nature of such data and its use in intelligence (especially between the metadata and the content of digital communications, the major focus of the bulk datasets in question) were constantly evolving. Equally confusing was the Court’s conclusion that while the data retention was “illegal”, it did not require CSIS to destroy the datasets due to both unclear “jurisdictional issues” around the data’s provenance and, somewhat strangely, because no one involved in the review asked for this to be done.
A three-year saga subsequently unfolded over resolving this issue between the Service and the Courts, during which CSIS declared that it would unilaterally destroy the datasets, while also putting in place the recommendations from both the Security Intelligence Review Committee's review and the Court judgement. The Committee endorsed these steps two years later in its 2018 annual review, while noting that further work was still required to ensure full alignment with legislation. With both the Court’s finding and Ministers recommending updates to CSIS’s legislative mandate to keep up with the evolving technology environment specifically around the concerns raised in these reviews, the government introduced new legislation in 2019 that brought major updates to the CSIS Act surrounding the management and use of datasets – including clearly distinguishing open-source from warranted collection. In spite of these compliance regime and legislative updates, however, in 2023 the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) determined that more work was needed by CSIS to ensure full compliance on its use of datasets; consequently, additional updates were made in 2024 to further clarify their uses.
At the same time, with the issues surrounding CSIS’s use of datasets the major focus of public attention on CSIS, the government quietly launched a public consultation on CSIS’s mandate which included centrally the issue of CSIS being restricted to advising only the Federal Government about threats, a long-recognised anachronism of the original CSIS Act and major impediment to national resilience against threats to all aspects of Canadian society. With broad perceived support for this amendment, the government acted on this shortcoming, amending the CSIS Act further (through the 2024 Countering Foreign Interference [CFI] Act that followed the Hogue Report) to allow the Service to disclose information to the provinces, municipalities, Indigenous self-governments in Canada, corporations and individuals when they were the focus of specific threats, or for criminal investigations or prosecutions.
While going almost unnoticed publicly, this constituted one of the biggest changes to CSIS’s mandate since 1984. Alongside this change to the CSIS Act, the government further fine-tuned the data handling terms in the CSIS Act through the CFI Act, which also mandated for the first time a five-yearly review cycle for the CSIS Act in order to address “rapid and unforeseen advancements in technology and threats [as well as] concerns raised by review agencies or civil liberty groups, effectiveness and necessity of powers, and possible new restrictions of mandate”. Taken alongside other major changes to Canada’s national security landscape not covered here – such as the 2019 creation of the new NSIRA, extending independent oversight to the whole Canadian intelligence community for the first time; the 2017 creation of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) putting Parliamentary oversight and review on a statutory footing for the first time; the 2019 passage of the Communications Security Establishment Act, which substantially clarified this agency’s position and role; the 2019 amalgamation into a single role of the Intelligence Commissioner overseeing specific CSIS and Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC, equivalent of the US's National Security Agency and the UK's GCHQ) activities; and the 2019 updating of the Security of Canada Information Disclosure Act to strengthen the sharing of classified information within the government in order to improve Canada’s institutional abilities to resist and combat activities undermining national security – the 2024 updates constituted some of the most fundamental changes to Canada’s security and intelligence posture with direct implications for CSIS’s mandate and operational posture, as well as Canadian national security. Yet within the political noise surrounding the foreign interference inquiries, these changes went almost unremarked upon from their tabling in mid-2023 to the passing of the CFI Act in June 2024.
Canada’s Intelligence Posture: Fit for today’s world?
While these updates constitute major, fundamental improvements to Canada’s national security and intelligence posture in line with the evolving national and international security environment, more needs to be done – especially in light of evolving world events in 2025. Instead of directly confronting the major unresolved issue for Canada’s national security dispensation since 1984 – a comprehensive foreign human intelligence function – the 2023 public consultation instead sought to further reinforce existing restrictions on CSIS’s foreign intelligence mandate to collection “within Canada” only, in place since 1984. Similarly, both the 2019 and 2024 updates to the CSIS Act largely sidestepped this issue, instead focusing on updating how CSIS’s work on threats to national security could be conducted. All of this constituted a continued fudging of this major issue. It would instead take a major scandal around the foreign ministry’s “intelligence” activities globally plus the series of rolling threats made against Canada by the new Trump Administration since January 2025 to shake this issue loose once again – which will be the focus of the second part of this post.
Dr Kevin A. O'Brien is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Intelligence and Cyber Security at King's College London. From 1993-2010, he served as an advisor to the Canadian government, as well as the UK and other Western governments, on national security, counter-terrorism, defence, cyber security and critical infrastructure protection issues, before joining the Canadian public service as a senior advisor and programme manager in national security. Since leaving the government, he has continued to serve as a security consultant to Western governments and critical infrastructure sectors, as well as supporting academic research and teaching on contemporary security topics. He has written extensively about contemporary intelligence, security and defence matters for more than 30 years. The views expressed in this post are entirely his own and should not be construed as representing those of any organisation he has been affiliated with.
