Madam Speaker, a clever motion has been put to the House that evokes a memory of transgressions from a bygone day. If approved, it would not serve the interest of Canadians or the lawful process that legislators designed to ensure their national security.
There are a large number of Canadians who are unclear about the role of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. These are serious people. If they are confused it is because they have been brought up on the myths about what an intelligence organization does.
I want to dispel some of these myths. Today I want to talk about what CSIS does and what it does not do.
There is the issue of law, of accountability and of democracy. The point I want to make is that CSIS exists because of those things, not despite them.
Nearly 50 years ago Canadians discovered, courtesy of Igor Gouzenko, that the Soviet Union was operating an espionage network here. The RCMP was asked to counter it and for decades it did. It became clear over time that police work and intelligence work were different. Police work involved enforcing the law, catching criminals and prosecuting them. Intelligence work involved warning governments and protecting people from acts by foreigners or by Canadians who threaten the security of our country.
The role of warner is very different from the role of enforcer. By its nature good warning requires good information. There are many ways to get information and some of them can conflict with civil liberties and the law. For that reason, among others, the Mackenzie commission of the late 1960s followed by the McDonald commission in the late 1970s both recommended that Canada's intelligence service be civilian in nature and that it be governed by a strict regime of law and accountability of review.
Simply put, CSIS exists because the government found that the rights of Canadians had not been adequately protected. In other words, the purpose of CSIS is to protect rights, to work within the law to be accountable to the elected Government of Canada.
There is probably no intelligence organization in the world that functions with a law that is so strict and comprehensive and as clear. The legislation governing some intelligence organizations elsewhere is often a few general paragraphs in length. Sometimes legislation does not even exist. The CSIS act is 29 pages long. Nine of those pages are devoted to outlining how what CSIS does is to be monitored, reviewed and approved by others outside. No other part of the federal bureaucracy is subject to such strict rules.
CSIS is under direct ministerial control and direction responsible to cabinet and responsible to Parliament. When CSIS engages in surveillance activities that are intrusive, such as electronic techniques, the director has to be personally satisfied in each case that the use of such techniques is necessary, that all other avenues have been exhausted and that the use of that technology is both lawful and within the mandate of the service. If it is not it does not happen. Even if the director thinks an action is justified, that is not good enough. The CSIS act requires him to secure the approval of the minister, the Solicitor General. If he does not approve, it does not happen. If he does, it does not end there. The case must be put to a judge on the Federal Court of Canada. There are no exceptions.
In addition, the law establishes two review agencies. One agency is internal with an independent auditor called the inspector general, with his own staff to report to the minister directly. He has complete access to literally everything that the service does.
The second review agency is external. We know it as the Security Intelligence Review Committee or, as some have mentioned, SIRC. It is independent both of CSIS and of government. SIRC also has its own staff. It has access to absolutely everything. It reports to Parliament annually. Its role, as it has described it, is to ensure that CSIS does things right and does the right things.
When CSIS was first created, SIRC found fault with some of what was done. It still does, but it stated in its 1991-92 report much has changed: "In the early years of this committee's mandate CSIS acted to a great extent as if it were simply a continuation of the RCMP security service. Despite public assertions to the contrary, SIRC felt that most CSIS targets, policies and procedures were virtually unchanged from those of a security service and that the CSIS preferred source of recruits was still the RCMP. It took over three years for this state of affairs to change significantly. CSIS is now virtually a new organization, hardly recognizable any more as the direct descendant of the security service of the RCMP. The number and type of CSIS targets, the rigorous justification required before anyone or any group is designated as a target, the lucidity, logic and balance of warrant affidavits submitted to the Federal Court, and the tone and content of reports by intelligence officers on target files have all changed significantly for the better. We still have criticisms to make, but our criticisms are no longer based upon strong and fundamental disagreement with the CSIS view of the world".
CSIS is a better organization because of that review process, but the mechanism of review and reporting have extended well beyond the work of that committee.
In 1987 Gordon Osbaldeston who had been clerk of the Privy Council was asked to look at CSIS. He recommended changes to the services top level organization, a new approach to training, development, and an improved infrastructure for CSIS. Those changes were made.
In 1989 Parliament reviewed the CSIS act, five years after it was created, and found that an organization to counter terrorism and espionage and to provide intelligence to the government was still needed in Canada.
In 1991 the then government responded to that parliamentary review. The best summary of its conclusions in terms of the service and the act of Parliament that governs it is provided by the title of the report, "On Course".
The third review since 1984 was done in the winter of 1992-93. The Solicitor General asked the director at that time to conduct a full review of the service and how it should change to take account of the end of the cold war and present and future threats to Canadian security. Today's service reflects the changed reality.
CSIS was created to enhance accountability, not evade it. CSIS was created to observe the rights and liberties of all Canadians. The law that governs CSIS is clear. The review that governs CSIS is comprehensive. The accountability of CSIS to the government is complete and the process of change and reform has been constant.
CSIS reflects our cultural diversity and many more women are part of the operation. Two out of three employees have been hired since 1984. The service has expanded dramatically its capacity for research and analysis including in depth long term studies of global security problems of relevance to Canada.
Hundreds of graduates in business administration, in history, in economics and in social sciences have been brought in. These people are not spies as some would prefer to believe. Many of them are analysts. Most are not sitting in some attic with a wire in their ear; they are at a desk reading. Much of what they analyse is open source material or information received from friends and allies.
The CIA estimates that 55 per cent of its finished intelligence product comes from open sources, in some areas 80 per cent. That makes two points. First, the other 20 per cent is also crucial. It is the stuff the guys they are trying to understand do not want them to know. It is what makes intelligence work differently and hopefully sometimes better than work produced internally from open sources. Second, the value added more often than not comes from brains, not bugging.
CSIS is not in the business of collecting information for collection sake. It is in the business of taking information, analysing it, integrating it, understanding it and then passing it on to the government. What CSIS does would be of no use if it kept the information for itself. It does not. Its role is to pass it on, to inform the government, to warn it and to reassure it. So the people are different and the focus is changing partly because old threats have disappeared and partly because new threats have emerged.
Security and intelligence was not the invention of the cold war. In Canada that function has been performed since the mid-nineteenth century when Sir John A. Macdonald asked the western frontier constabulary to patrol the borders of Upper Canada and to report on American Civil War activities that might affect Canada's security. The intelligence function was performed and continued until the cold war commenced. The beginning of the cold war was not the beginning of the need for intelligence, and the end of the cold war does not mean the end of that is near. Indeed some challenges have been made worse by the collapse of the Berlin wall.
There are two types of threats that CSIS is responsible for meeting. The first is public safety. The second is national security. I will deal with public safety first. Simply put, public safety involves protecting Canadians against violence. Violence can come from abroad through terrorism. Violence can be fostered here through extremism or the support of terrorism elsewhere. Warning of that potential violence and its prevention is called counterterrorism. That was not a worry for Canada for most of the forties, fifties and sixties, but with the explosion of terrorist groups and the incidents of the seventies it became a serious concern.
It became clear that Canada was not immune with the 1982 assassination of a Turkish diplomat in Ottawa. So too the takeover of the Turkish embassy in 1985 and the shocking tragedy that same year with Air India in which 329 Canadians died. CSIS shifted its responses and its resources to match the new threat.
In 1984 when CSIS was created only 20 per cent of its resources were devoted to counterterrorism and 80 per cent was devoted to counterintelligence. By 1992 the picture was dramatically different: a full 56 per cent of the operational resources were devoted by then to counterterrorism.
Public safety or the protection of Canadian lives is the number one priority. It is also the number one difficulty. The sources of terrorism geographically are diverse. Groups come and groups go. The inventions, activities, movements and targets of individuals and governments are almost impossible to predict. Their methods are by definition extreme. Their reach is global and the consequences of failure are severe.
The challenge of Canada's security service is to ensure this country is not the place where people are killed. That is not the only challenge. There are four others. We do not want to be the country where terrorism is planned. We do not want to be the country in which money for terrorism is raised. We do not want to be the country where the material to commit the act is bought.
We do not want to be the place where the terrorists hide after the deed is done.
In a sense dealing with the cold war was much easier. It was fairly obvious what countries the spies came from. Opposing intelligence specialists were extremely familiar with each other's habits. There was almost a code of conduct. It was all somewhat predictable, almost choreographed. That predictability, that order, is not there with terrorism.
The terrorist threat is not diminishing. The technology of terrorism is becoming more accessible, more convenient. The sources of terrorism remain strong: nationalism, religious and political extremism and state sponsored terrorism. There is a correlation between the proliferation of terrorism and the proliferation of regional conflict. Regional conflict continues. There is also a correlation between ethnic unrest and hatred and the proliferation of terrorism.
Looking at Asia, the former Soviet Union, eastern Europe, Africa and even Northern Ireland, it is clear that unrest will continue. Unfortunately Canadians will always be vulnerable. Our borders are open and long. We are a wealthy industrial society, a good target for extremists, a good place to secure equipment, technology and funds. Links of family, emotion, ideology and culture exist among millions of Canadians and societies abroad. When conflicts grip those countries the echoes can be felt here.
The concerns of Canada's security intelligence service are several: first, to prevent the spread of homeland conflicts to Canada; second, to prevent the exploitation of immigrant countries for fund raising to support those conflicts; and, third, to prevent terrorism or support for terrorism that originates here in relation to conflicts abroad.
The job of CSIS is early warning. It passes that information on to the government. Each year hundreds of threat assessments are prepared for the government by CSIS. The vast majority of them dealt with terrorism. Much of what it does involves dampening concerns rather than increasing them.
Let me now turn to the second major priority of CSIS, national security. Simply put, this is about spying. Its job is to counter that. That is why it is called counterintelligence. The focus is on the activities of the organization that are the creatures of foreign governments.
CSIS is concerned about countries that are one or more of the following: potential enemies equipped with weapons of mass destruction capable of striking Canada; countries that seek to develop such weapons through threat and theft of technology; countries that violate our sovereignty by meddling in our ethnic communities; countries that try to exercise repressive control over their citizens in Canada who are here on visitor exchanges; and countries that seek to prejudice our economic security by covertly gaining access to our leading edge technologies.
Throughout the cold war much of CSIS activity was devoted to countering those activities, but that was before the Berlin wall fell. What about the new world order? Unfortunately some of the new world order is not new. Arms control agreements have been negotiated and are substantially reducing the nuclear threat that is still there.
Other countries continue to conduct espionage operations here because the reasons for spying remain strong. Communists did not invent spying; the desire for national advantage did. Spying is a cheap way to acquire weapons technology whether conventional or weapons of mass destruction.
The proliferation problem is getting worse, not better. We have much of that technology here. It is at our nuclear, chemical and pharmaceutical industries; in our electronic sector; and in our machine tool capacities. As long as we are an open and wealthy country with a leading economy, countries will come here to spy and not simply for weapons. Developing countries eager to catch up with the rest of world find espionage a highly efficient way to modernize their economies. Former communist countries may begin to resort to intelligence gathering for the same reason. Everyone is after the competitive edge.
In conclusion, the motion admonishes the government for not having set up a royal commission. I have already mentioned the Security Intelligence Review Committee. In addition we have established a parliamentary committee to further examine specific aspects of CSIS.
This is not to detract from what may well have been useful exercises, but I have here summaries of various costs of royal commissions: aboriginal peoples, $13 million over nine months; national passenger transportation, $23 million over three months; Citizens' Forum on Canada's Future, $23 million over eight months; and reproductive technologies, $25 million over three years. The list goes on.
Members of the Bloc have accused the government of creating deficits on the backs of Quebecers. Here is a clear case of the Bloc proposing the wasting of taxpayers' money on more studies that benefit no one. More interesting is the fact that the Bloc members, through their own representation on parliamentary committees, are saying they are so inept to carry out investigative powers the electorate has bestowed on them that we have to pay outside experts to do their jobs.
I do not think the taxpayers of Canada and especially those in Quebec will be pleased to learn of that. This motion is an insult to all people of Canada who are so concerned about controlling government spending and getting our economic house in order.
