Abstract
To understand the Canadian security and intelligence community requires clever navigation of the vacuum created by the general failure of Canadian government transparency. The vacuum has been sustained by the bewildering lack of interest in the subject of national security displayed by the Canadian academic community at large. The first effort made to publish a description of the Canadian intelligence community in some holistic way occurred two decades ago and took the shape of a meagre pamphlet produced by the Privy Council Office. Only in 2019 did we see a more useful update, produced in the first annual report from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP).
The need for a collection such as this might thus seem self-evident. The essays are short, informative, and well-written. The assembled authors represent top-notch and respected talent drawn from the very small pool of Canadian experts. Yet, in trying to produce a useful map of the Canadian intelligence system, the collection as a whole confronts two challenges – one is secrecy and the other is the tempo of change.
Top Secret Canada, despite its nifty title, does not actually discuss the secrecy challenge head-on, but its effects can be found in efforts to penetrate some of the less well-known elements of the Canadian system. Stephanie Carvin, in her essay on the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre (ITAC), rightly points to it as an interesting test case for the value of an intelligence fusion centre. Unfortunately, the history of ITAC is sufficiently obscure to prevent any telling of its surprising evolution from the original model, titled the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre, established in 2004 and promoted as part of the first-ever government National Security Policy, to the more narrowly focused centre of today dealing solely with terrorism threats. Along the way, ITAC abandoned efforts to be a source of information for a wider community of first responders and officials outside the traditional boundaries of intelligence. Oral history interviews with previous directors of ITAC might have helped fill out the story. John Pyrik tackles the subject of the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre (FINTRAC), which deals with criminal money laundering and terrorist financing. Although Pyrik once worked at FINTRAC as an analyst, he admits that it is difficult to measure the performance or value of FINTRAC’s work given the lack of public data.
Other authors in the collection find workarounds to the secrecy problem through use of available public records and material released through the Access to Information Act. Bill Robinson, the author of the chapter on the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s long-established cryptologic agency, now charged with deriving intelligence from the ‘global information infrastructure’, is a master at this, well known for the work he publishes on his CSE-focused blog, ‘Lux ex Umbra’. Kent Roach is similarly able to make good use of the available documentary record in his chapter on the RCMP.
The editors of the volume are well aware that they are writing at a time of fast-paced change for the Canadian security and intelligence system. This tempo of change has thrust to the fore new and non-traditional threats in areas such as health security, climate change impacts, and the economy, none of which are covered in the volume. Change has also produced a radical new system for independent review of the security and intelligence system, with three new entities created since 2017 – the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency and the Office of the Intelligence Commissioner. The volume of public reporting that has emerged recently from these review bodies mostly came too late to be incorporated into Top Secret Canada. The result is that aspects of the volume are threatened with rapid obsolescence, not least the chapter on review and oversight by Leah West, written while the new review system was still in the process of formation. Other chapters, such as the one on the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), would have benefitted greatly from an ability to utilise review body reporting. Reference to the NSICOP annual report for 2019 might have helped the CBSA chapter, written by a committee of four, to be more revealing than it manages.
The editors’ encouragement to their authors to discuss challenges and controversies was key to trying to ensure that the essay chapters would have some decent shelf life. But it was also balanced by editorial direction to talk about issues such as mandate, inter-agency cooperation and resources, which all tended to emphasise organization detail and narrative at the expense of more critical analysis. The best essays in the collection manage to meet all these objectives – including the ones on CSE by Robinson, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police by Roach, the Department of National Defence/Canadian Armed Forces by Thomas Juneau and the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence, by two serving officials, Brett Kubicek and Michael King. What the volume as a whole suggests is that the challenges and controversies faced by individual security and intelligence agencies tend to be specific to their mandates and organizational history. What the volume lacks is an effort to draw larger conclusions on this score.
There are two essays in the volume that might appear to sit at the margins of a discussion of security and intelligence agencies – those on the Department of Justice and on the Prime Minister’s Office. The justice essay, by Craig Forcese and Jennifer Poirier, offers the best line in the collection, when it suggests that ‘lawyers sit at the metaphorical elbow of security agencies’. As Forcese and Poierier know well, that system is not perfect, but it is essential in a democracy. Even a casual browser of Top Secret Canada would do well to linger over the essay by Meredith Lilly, who served in Stephen Harper’s PMO. Not only does it explain some of the mysteries and challenges of working in a political office at a senior level, it also puts a real human face to the work, not least in reminding us that exposure to intelligence secrets, often with their drumbeat of bad news, can itself be cumulatively traumatic. If we had more memoir literature from Canadian practitioners of intelligence, most of whom are deterred by our draconian Official Secrets Act, we might better appreciate this ground truth.
The editors of Top Secret Canada aspire to reach a variety of audiences – public servants, academics, students and the interested general public. The aspiration is worthy, but the current audience is very small. Essentially a reference text – especially with those chapters that do manage to explore the challenges ahead for key agencies – this essay collection awaits a future in which more attention might be paid to national security issues, especially in Canadian universities and among the general public. That day is coming, propelled by changes to the global threat landscape which will dispel the myth of Canadian geographic safety, and by greater volumes of reporting from the new review agency and a promised cultural shift in the Canadian national security system to embrace great transparency.