A former CSIS senior intelligence officer accused Stephen Harper of fear mongering to delay the acceptance of Syrian refugees to Canada during a calculated re-election bid.

Michel Juneau-Katsuya, who now heads the Ottawa-based security consulting firm the Northgate Group, said years of cuts under Harper's Conservative government has thinned out the number of seasoned immigration officers necessary to process the thousands of refugees it has promised to resettle in Canada.

It's really, really sad to see a situation where the refugees are being used for ideological purposes. - Michel Juneau-Katsuya

"The most important part: you need the political will. The political will has not been there and, unfortunately, this government has used the issue of security for a long time before the refugee crisis as a political card, trying to maintain the insecurity so that it can help them to be re-elected," Juneau-Katsuya said on CBC Radio's Ottawa Morning on Thursday.

"It's really, really sad to see a situation where the refugees are being used for ideological purposes."

Harper has maintained in the face of a growing Syrian refugee crisis that proper security screening is necessary before resettlement in Canada — especially for those from countries where extremist organizations operate, such as Syria and Iraq.

During a campaign stop on Thursday, Harper said the government is "going to take some concrete steps to expedite the process" of resettling Syrian refugees in Canada but did not announce specific measures.

Juneau-Katsuya said it is "absolutely" necessary to exercise control at the border and assess refugees in case they are dangerous. He emphasized ISIS fighters have not been flooding out to North America to operate attacks.

"What we've seen is sympathizers that decided to take action on their own an operate in the country they were already established and living in," he said.

"ISIS is currently under enormous pressure in their control zone and they need all the fighters they can to try to support and to keep the control that they currently have."