-Hi, I’m Martin Rust with the Security and Policy Institute of Professional Development,
here, at the University of Ottawa.
My guest, this afternoon, is Phil Lagassé, associate
professor of Public and International Affairs, here at the University, and we’ve been
talking a little bit about geopolitical events and how they impact Canada and obviously,
part of that is the whole security question and the overlay of security which affects
everything, which brings our attention to Canada’s own security intelligence services.
-Mm-mm.
-Recently, there’s been a lot in the media about C-51 and other things but specifically,
I wanted to ask you about the oversight of Canada’s
intelligence services and where you think that is today versus, perhaps, where
it needs to go?
-Well, one thing that’s really quite clear in the debate is a desire for parliament to
play a greater role in oversight of the intelligence
services, but what’s interesting about the discussion is that we don’t really seem
to know what parliament would do or how it could operate.
-Right.
-Now, fundamentally, when we look at other Westminster countries such as Great Britain
or Australia or New Zealand, they have committees of parliamentarians that provide
something of an oversight rule but really, what they do is review.
That is …
-Right.
-… they look at what the government’s done, whether things are acting within the
legal framework that they’ve been provided and
whether they’re spending money properly and
so on and so forth.
So, it is not the type of oversight that we see in Congress, where the
legislatures are actually deeply in some kind of decision making or guiding intelligence
agencies.
So, the debate in Canada seems to have almost an idealized vision of what
legislative review of intelligence agencies would actually look like.
So, what we first need to realize is: what exactly would we want
parliament to do that other bodies might be able to do better?
And one of those bodies would be the Security and Intelligence
Review Committee.
Now, that … the budget for that organisation has now been …
-Mm-mm.
-… increased in the 2015 budget and potentially, that might be the better way to go
because that body does provide what we might call more robust review capability, within
the executive role that maybe parliamentarians might not be able to accomplish.
-And that’s today, where the vast majority of oversight exists, of those intelligence
services in Canada.
Correct?
-That’s right, but we also have to bear in mind the role of judiciary.
Now, this is often times cast as a minor part of what some of
the security intelligence community does but in
fact, it is quite significant, that you do have judges that do need to sign off on certain
activities that Canadians might be less comfortable with.
So, rather than denigrate that role, we should take a look at it and see
just how serious that is because I would suggest that most commentary tends to downplay it
when in fact, it is a significant part of the
oversight process.
-And most people, I think, would wonder at some level how much does oversight impair
their ability, the intelligence services’ ability, to actually do their job and where
do these two things collide?
-Well, I think this is the important distinction between oversight and review.
The review tradition is you look at something after the
fact.
You take it for granted that the intelligence agencies have the legal authority
to do something and you look at what they’ve done afterwards, to make sure that
they do it within the realm of their legal authority and therefore, you give them the
discretion to act in the ways that they need to
act, and you then look at what they did after the fact.
Oversight is much different type of role where you’re acting almost as a veto
on what they’re doing and in those cases, you
can have situations where you’re impeding their work and this is where, I think, the
debate lies.
-And so … to help me understand, that’s more the congressional type of model that
we see in the United States today, correct?
-That’s correct, that’s correct …
-It’s more of that directly, hands on, oversight rule as oppose to the review process, which
we see in other countries like Britain and some of the other Five Eyes countries, which
is a more backward looking review.
-Right.
The purpose of oversight, let’s say, in a congressional setting is that Congress can
actually use its spending authority to direct what an intelligence service is doing to act
as a check and a balance against the Presidency
and the executive in terms of how they want those resources spent.
It’s a very different role than what we see in Westminster states
where these committees, their function is merely to insure that the intelligence agencies
acted within the law and acted properly and to recommend better ways forward, but their
role is not to assume a decision making function as you see in the congressional model.
-Clearly, the role of the intelligence services in Canada and beyond is still evolving and
we’re relatively young in the process.
It leads me to the question of whether or not we
need, Canada needs, a foreign intelligence service.
What are your views on that?
-Well, the first thing I would say is we do foreign intelligence in a variety of ways.
So, we have military intelligence that looks broadly,
we have foreign intelligence as being conducted by the department of Foreign Affairs.
What we’re really talking about when we say "foreign intelligence", is: do we want
an offensive intelligence capability operating in other countries.
Now, that may seem attractive, but they are some significant
downsides that we have to be aware of.
First, doing so across the world in areas of
interest would be vastly expensive and chances are we would not want to spend those
resources currently because we don’t really know where we would want it directed.
That’s the big challenge, is: where exactly would you want that intelligence agency to
operate and are you getting it right?
So, who know … if you would ask in the 1990s whether or not Afghanistan would be a vital
area for us to have clear intelligence …
-Mm-mm.
-… about, we would have failed in answering that question, at that time.
So, when you’re looking at "Does Canada need a foreign intelligence
service?", where would we want it to operate?
Perhaps in certain regions where we have economic interests, perhaps in certain
regions that we assume may have some instability, but if we’re going to do more than
simply looking at open sources and looking at diplomatic type of intelligence …
-Mm-mm.
-… and military intelligence, which we are already doing, we would be undertaking a
more offensive role and the question for Canada is: is that really something we need to be
doing?
What would be getting out of it?
And I remain somewhat sceptical that that’s a
capability that we require, at this point.
-And so, that debate will continue …
-Indeed.
-… an certainly, one that we will continue to explore, here, at the Institute.
My name is Martin Rust and I’m with the Security and
Policy Institute of Professional Development, here, at the University of Ottawa.
My guest, this afternoon, is Phil Lagassé, associate
professor of Public and International Affairs, here, at the University of Ottawa.
Thank you, Phil.
-Thank you.