Enabling Canada’s Foreign Intelligence Capabilities in a Rapidly-Evolving World
In its 2025 election platform, Canada’s new government committed to undertaking a national security review. With its last national security policy launched in 2004 – and with today’s geostrategic environment almost unrecognisable compared to that time – such an updating is urgently required to ensure that Canada’s national interests, national and international security stances, and global intelligence needs are fully aligned. As part of this, one of the core issues it is rumoured this review will include is the future state of Canada’s foreign intelligence capability.
Canada does not have a formally constituted foreign human intelligence service in the same mould as the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Germany’s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), or the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) – but with the threats made against Canada’s sovereignty, national well-being, and role in the FIVE EYES intelligence-sharing arrangement by the second Trump Administration, coupled with the dynamically-evolving global geostrategic environment and the consequent significant enhancements to Canada’s national defence announced earlier this month, there are renewed calls for Canada to establish such a capability. The major unresolved issue within Canada’s modern national security dispensation since its creation in 1984 – and long the focus of debate in Canadian academic and policy circles – it had almost never entered the mainstream of public and political debate; however, the above issues combined with the foreign interference scandal discussed in the first part of this post and the 'foreign intelligence' scandal that engulfed Canada’s foreign ministry discussed below have, since 2023, raised it to the headlines and renewed such calls.
'Foreign intelligence' has long been the proverbial can perpetually kicked down the road in Canadian national security – but is that perception accurate? Canada actually has an extensive foreign intelligence capability today – just not the one considered by the formulators of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) Act in 1984. This decades-old vision has served as the basis for all debate concerning this function over the last forty years – a vision which has categorically been overcome by developments in statute, operations, and geopolitics since then, and thus arguably outdated today. Over those four decades, the ambiguity inherent to both the Act’s delineation of 'foreign intelligence' and the mandates of Canada’s intelligence community relating to 'foreign intelligence' has led to both opportunity and scandal. While the changes to the CSIS Act and other intelligence-related legislation since 2015 discussed in the first part of this post (and further outlined below) have gone a long way to clarifying this ambiguity, this has not yet gone far enough to put Canada’s intelligence community on the footing it needs for today’s increasingly unstable and dangerous world.
In light of this urgency as encapsulated in the new government’s stated priority of “protecting Canadian sovereignty” – but notably with no mention made of this in Prime Minister Carney’s recent announcement of major increases to Canada’s national defence and cyber security capabilities – the shortest path to resolving Canada’s 'foreign intelligence' needs is for the government to more effectively use what is has today, rather than considering a ‘big bang’ change to Canada’s national security posture. Central to this is CSIS, now significantly more empowered by changes to the CSIS Act since 2015 to conduct operations globally; to enable this, however, change is required to the decades-old interpretations of that Act and its distinctions between 'threats to national security' and 'foreign intelligence'. With rumours growing that the mooted national security review is underway, the Canadian government should fully clarify, once and for all, this ambiguity as part of ensuring that Canada’s overall intelligence needs can be met in a rapidly-evolving geostrategic environment.
This second part will assess what these updates to CSIS’s mandate mean for this 'foreign intelligence' requirement, alongside changes already made to Canada’s national security dispensation outlined in the first part of this post – and what further changes are therefore required to provide Canada’s full foreign intelligence capabilities in support of its national interests.
Canada and 'Foreign Intelligence' – An Anachronistic Definitional Muddle
Canada’s lack of a formal foreign human intelligence capability was not an oversight. Rather, the McDonald Commission that proposed the creation of CSIS in 1981 determined that – with an almost uniquely Canadian view of what is ‘right’ – it would effectively be ‘un-Canadian’ to engage in espionage against other states, undermining “the image of honesty and straightforwardness in the conduct of international affairs [that] produce benefits to this country”. It was also assessed that intelligence-sharing arrangements with ‘friendly’ intelligence agencies would compensate for this gap, with most allies willingly providing this intelligence to Canada – a Cold War reasoning echoed down the decades and almost certainly never accurate. Finally, the Commission questioned the costs involved in creating such an agency alongside those for creating CSIS at the same time.
Ultimately, the Commission did not take a final position on this question but, while favouring the idea, rather recommended that a future review do so – which never happened post-1984. Instead, the parliamentary processes that led to the CSIS Act (Canada’s foundational national security legislation) fudged this issue, granting CSIS authority in section 16 of the Act for the “collection of information concerning foreign states and persons…in relation to the defence of Canada or the conduct of the international affairs of Canada”. It restricted conducting such activities, however, to “within Canada” and only against foreign (non-Canadian) entities either in Canada or (as newly-clarified in 2024) “temporarily outside Canada”.
Notably, 'foreign intelligence' per se is not actually defined in the CSIS Act, but rather inferred based on the section 16 mandate – the reason it is used in quotes generally here. In comparison, “threats to the security of Canada” are clearly defined in section 12 of the Act – but crucially not where activities to address those could occur. 'Foreign intelligence' is, however, defined in the Communications Security Establishment (CSEC) Act which authorises CSEC to carry-out defined “foreign [SIGINT] intelligence activities as they relate to international affairs, defence, or security” as part of its mandate – with the notable caveat that these do not target Canadians.
In sum therefore, between CSIS and CSEC, Canadian statutes authorise 'foreign intelligence' activities against any non-Canadian anywhere in the world in any form except HUMINT which remains restricted to a “within Canada” focus; however, these same statutes authorise intelligence activities of any type – including now digital intelligence actions (see below) – against any entity anywhere in the world addressing "threats to national security". While all of this taken together gives Canada three-quarters of what it needs for a comprehensive foreign intelligence capability, it still leaves the issue of its foreign human intelligence capability apparently unresolved.
Canada’s 'Foreign Intelligence' Options Today
The question of what foreign human intelligence capability Canada should have cannot be kicked down the road any longer – Canada is out of road. Over the decades, there have been many proposals as to how Canada should approach a foreign human intelligence capability, all generally based on the legacy interpretation of 'foreign intelligence' in the CSIS Act. Successive governments over the decades have acknowledged this need, but done little to address it.
For such a capability, there are effectively three options: build a new agency from scratch while consolidating disparate components from across government; create this capability as an offshoot of the foreign ministry (as is broadly the case in other countries such as the UK or Australia); or continue to enhance CSIS’s existing mandate. The first has always presented significant challenges in time, effort and cost, as one of the most recent calls for this capability continues to note – all of which does not address the urgency for this need today.
While the second was raised routinely over the years, it no longer appears to be an option in light of the scandal that played out since 2023 surrounding the intelligence programme of Canada’s foreign ministry, Global Affairs Canada (GAC). In summary, an overt diplomatic reporting capability established by GAC in 2002 – the Global Security Reporting Program (GSRP) – was both found to have strayed dangerously away from its mandate into increasingly-risky 'foreign intelligence' activities following its expansion globally after 2006, and was implicated in two high-profile instances of China seizing Canadians as hostages when Chinese nationals resident in Canada were arrested on US espionage warrants in 2014-2016 and 2018-2021. The resulting scandal provides a cautionary tale concerning ambiguity in Canada’s approach to 'foreign intelligence' when proper guardrails and support are not instituted, mandates are murky, and activities drift into risky and often dangerous areas. The oversight review of the GSRP concluded that “the creation of a foreign intelligence entity within GAC…would run against the principles of [Diplomatic Relations]. Therefore, it is important that the Government…decide on the most appropriate means of collecting this kind of information” – thereby rejecting the option for the foreign ministry to host Canada’s foreign human intelligence capability.
CSIS – Canada’s De Facto 'Foreign Intelligence' Agency Today
Building on what exists in CSIS today is the most practical, cost-effective, and timely approach possible to meeting Canada’s full foreign human intelligence needs today in the most pragmatic way given the urgency of this requirement. In its evolution since 2015, the CSIS Act provides the building-blocks for this; while they are by no means perfect – for example, a major issue that needs addressing is ensuring that the government’s law-makers and lawyers stay fully au courant to the evolving operational, digital and legal environments in order to support CSIS’s ability to fulfil its mission, a recurring issue between CSIS and the courts – but provide the shortest path to actioning the required capabilities within the context of the major challenges Canada faces and the rapidly-changing geostrategic environment. It not only avoids the costs in time and money to build something from scratch but crucially builds on the fact that CSIS is effectively doing this today under its existing authorities.
In short, Canada should not allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good. While a fulsome analysis of the steps and resources needed to achieve this must be done by the Canadian government – as noted in a helpful assessment written in 2021 by three former intelligence leaders that laid out the range of considerations needed – there is a clear foundation in CSIS today for fulfilling this role.
First, the 2015 update to the CSIS Act made explicit the “outside Canada” mandate for CSIS’s national security activities. CSIS has conducted intelligence operations overseas under this section 12 mandate since at least the early-2000s when this was first revealed by its then-Director; by the mid-2000s, it had created and was growing a stand-alone International Region Branch to focus on skills, specialist training and operational support needs for conducting covert operations globally. By the mid-2010s, its Foreign Stations were regularly reviewed (generally favourably) by its oversight body to be operating as expected and required – with enhancements made through the deployment of analytical resources abroad (2015-16), in the IT systems used in collection abroad (2016-17), and in how operations were being conducted in dangerous operating environments (2017-18), while also noting areas requiring urgent attention such as specific overseas collection guardrails (2015).
Second, CSIS also has mandates to conduct security assessments of individuals and organisations (section 13 of the Act) – including national security reviews of foreign investments in Canada; to provide national security advice on citizenship and immigration (section 14); and to conduct investigations to support both of these, including “outside Canada” (section 15). Often overlooked, these mandates can be key contributors to CSIS’s intelligence picture; while they cannot be used explicitly for 'foreign intelligence' purposes, section 19 allows the Service to also report any incidental information obtained under these mandates and section 12 that may be relevant to Canada’s foreign affairs, defence, and (as was added in 2024) “building resiliency against threats to the security of Canada”. Taken alongside the global section 12 mandate, these provisions all together provide a broad remit for CSIS to generate intelligence globally on foreign entities of interest to the Canadian government.
At the same time, the Anti-Terrorism Act added the ability for CSIS to conduct “threat reduction measures”, notably both within and outside of Canada – meaning that CSIS now had the power to engage in specified covert disruption activities globally in support of its national security mandate. The 2019 updates to the CSIS Act further enabled this by authorising CSIS employees to break the law under specific operational circumstances – which notably also addresses a key concern of the McDonald Commission concerning the difference between a domestic security service and a more fulsome intelligence service.
Even more notably, the same 2015 updates also clarified that CSIS’s warranted activities (e.g. covert interception, surveillance, or similar methods) could be executed outside of Canada under its national security mandate. Finally, the 2019 and 2024 updates to the Act also clarified that CSIS can collect “foreign datasets” globally for use under sections 12, 15 and 16 – in effect, meaning that CSIS can collect foreign digital intelligence globally, calling further into question why it cannot do the same for human intelligence.
Clarifying and Consolidating Canada’s Global Intelligence Approach
In sum – and acknowledging that this is a very succinct summary of a highly-complex topic, with many counter-points possible (e.g. the perceived risks of consolidating both intelligence functions in one agency; the potential benefits of amalgamating all existing 'foreign intelligence' capabilities from across government into a new agency; or the very legitimate question as to whether it is appropriate for CSIS’s global intelligence operations to be run solely under the Minister of Public Safety) – CSIS has both the mandate for and many years of experience in conducting covert human intelligence work globally. This mandate is, however, still shaped by how both 'threats to the security of Canada' and 'foreign intelligence' were delineated in 1984. In 2025, these distinct delineations are now fully intertwined: Canada’s sovereignty, national security and well-being can be directly threatened by bilateral or global actions such as fundamentally attacking the country’s economic, financial, ethno-social, and political basis; indeed, these are exactly the targets of many hostile states engaging in offensive intelligence activities against Canada and Canadian interests – activities which are carried out globally and not only in Canada. In this sense, while CSIS has used its 'threats' mandate to evolve with the times, the continued ambiguity – in statute, in government discussions concerning CSIS’s mandate, and in public and academic debate – around its 'foreign intelligence' mandate must be addressed and similarly clarified in law. This must include clarifying existing statutes surrounding the management of CSIS’s global operations, with renewed concerns raised recently around the politicisation and risking of this process.
To accomplish this – with the opportunity to do so missed in the 2023 review of CSIS’s mandate – the new government should:
- clearly define 'foreign intelligence' within the CSIS Act – the definition of 'foreign intelligence' in the CSEC Act, which brings together both the global and security intelligence needs, is one that CSIS could immediately work to;
- strike the “within Canada” restriction from section 16 of the Act and align section 19 with this update to remove the remaining ambiguity both in the Act and in CSIS’s mandate to support Canada’s global human intelligence needs, ambiguity which continues to cause major issues and has been criticized by Parliament; and
- ensure that CSIS is properly resourced and supported, with its operating model updated to both fulfil this extended mission and continue working in close co-operation with CSEC for SIGINT, the Privy Council Office for all-source assessments, GAC for diplomatic reporting and foreign intelligence co-ordination, National Defence for defence intelligence, and other ministries and departments in their roles.
In facing risks that American intelligence sharing may decline both bilaterally and within the FIVE EYES, Canada should further reposition its global intelligence approach around enhancing its intelligence relationships within the other FOUR EYES (the UK, Australia and New Zealand) and key global partners in Europe and Asia-Pacific, to complement this institutional evolution. Further underpinning and enhancing this 'foreign intelligence' capability will also enhance the ‘give to get’ dynamics of these relationships: the more Canada brings to the table, the more it will receive back – a long-standing criticism surrounding Canada’s lack of a formally-constituted foreign intelligence service.
These steps would give the Canadian government its much-needed foreign human intelligence capability today – not several years from now as would be the likely timeline for creating a brand new foreign intelligence service. Canada’s existing national security bureaucracy would not require the significant upheaval envisaged in the creation of a new agency, through hiving-off and consolidating parts of CSIS and other government entities today. Equally, this would ensure that the range of intelligence collected or operations initiated under each mandate which could legitimately be supported under a second mandate would be readily available for take-up within statutory guardrails; with threats and opportunities unfolding at breakneck speed in today’s hyper-dynamic global environment, this is more likely to move at pace than an inter-agency process, a key concern of the Hogue Report on foreign interference discussed in part I. More mundane but crucial existing elements – such as the well-established ways of working, integrated IT systems, internal policies, and internal relationships noted by both Security Intelligence Review Committee and National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) over many years, as cited above – further argue for building within CSIS, rather than a new entity which would take years to establish the same. Alongside these mandatory and organisational foundations, the oversight roles provided by the NSIRA, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, and the Intelligence Commissioner (who reviews and approves foreign intelligence activities amongst others for CSIS and CSEC) also already cover all of CSIS’s activities.
The idea of CSIS playing this full role is not new: at another inflection point in history – the end of the Cold War – CSIS’s oversight body recommended that the “within Canada” restriction in section 16 be removed so that CSIS could conduct foreign intelligence activities globally, rather than creating a new separate agency like the UK’s SIS or ASIS. Indeed, a CSIS with this full mandate would be akin to both New Zealand’s SIS (NZSIS) and the Dutch General Intelligence & Security Services (or AIVD), both of which have equal national security intelligence and foreign intelligence mandates within the same agency and the benefits that this brings.
Conclusion – Canadian Foreign Intelligence in a Dangerous World
The Carney government needs to finish the job started in 2015 to both fully formulate Canada’s global human intelligence posture and clarify CSIS’s mandate to support this. The evolution of CSIS into a de facto global intelligence service needs to be made de jure in statute to end the ambiguity, mitigate against future issues arising from this ambiguity, and ensure a clear approach can be taken by Canada’s government and bureaucracy to its global intelligence priorities. Ottawa appears to be acknowledging this need in light of the rapidly-changing world: in March 2025, the National Security & Intelligence Advisor stated that Canada needed to be “less dependent on its partners… a little bit more selfish now [and] think about how to protect Canada [and] have the appropriate capabilities to defend Canada”. As the Carney government formulates plans for its national security review – including this 'foreign intelligence' question – building on what already exists in CSIS and has been operating for two decades now is the most efficient, cost-effective, and crucially timely option to address this urgent need for Canada’s current and future sovereignty, national security and national well-being.
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.
