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Unveiled last week, Bill C-22 proposes the creation of a “national security and intelligence committee of parliamentarians,” with a mandate to review the operations of at least 17 government departments and agencies with security and intelligence functions.

The move honours a Liberal election promise to boost scrutiny of national security operations to offset the increased counterterrorism powers granted to security services and police under the Anti-terrorism Act of 2015, formerly Bill C-51.

Review of the national security apparatus (and the handling of public complaints) is now siloed within three, small watchdog agencies staffed by subject-matter experts, including the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), which conducts after-the-fact reviews of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the country’s human spy service. The three expert organizations will continue their work, at least for now.

Each, however, has limited statutory authority to exchange information with the others and cannot pursue investigations that stray into a counterpart’s jurisdiction. SIRC, for example, cannot follow CSIS’s trail when it crosses into the jurisdiction of the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), the foreign signals intelligence service.

The new all-party committee of seven MPs and two Senators, to be chosen by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and supported by a small secretariat, would be sworn to permanent secrecy and tasked with reviewing any and all national security activities to gauge whether they are effective, efficient and legal. Its primary investigative tool would be a statutory power to access many of the nation’s most guarded secrets.