OTTAWA—A former Tory senator says the new powers proposed for Canada’s spies under the Conservatives’ new terror law are “unprecedented” in peace time.

But Hugh Segal wonders if what Canadians are living through can properly be called “peace time.”

“I think the question is what we now face with ISIS, and what we face with networked, digital recruitment . . . whether this is a different threat than what we faced 10 or 15 years ago,” Segal said in an interview earlier this week. “And I would argue that it is.”

Bill C-51 would give the Canadian Security Intelligence Service police-like powers to “disrupt” threats to Canada. CSIS would be able to use those powers to address terrorist threats, but also threats to Canada’s infrastructure or economic stability.

Both opposition parties and security experts have criticized the Conservatives for drastically expanding CSIS’s powers, while declining to include more independent oversight over Canada’s spies.

Segal, who retired from the Senate last year and currently holds the post of master at Massey College, has long championed increased oversight for Canada’s intelligence agencies.

Unlike our closest security partners, Canada has no parliamentary oversight of the country’s various spy agencies.

The review bodies Canada does have are dwarfed by the agencies they’re supposed to monitor. For instance, the Security Intelligence Review Committee — with 17 employees and a budget of under $3 million — is tasked with reviewing the operations of CSIS, with a projected budget of $537 million. The Communications Security Establishment — Canada’s answer to the NSA, employing more than 2,000 — has a review body with an annual budget of around $2 million.

While Segal is largely supportive of the spirit of C-51, he called the absence of increased oversight a serious “weakness” in the bill.

“When the United States and the United Kingdom and France and Germany and Belgium — NATO partners all — have . . . parliamentary oversight that is much more substantial than ours, it’s hard to understand why we would not take that path,” Segal said.

“I think that is a flaw.”

Before he retired for the Senate, Segal put forward Bill S-220 to put in place an intelligence and security oversight committee of parliamentarians. The bill is currently stalled on the first step of the legislative process in the Senate.

It would take a massive political push to move the bill along to have it approved by both the Senate and the House of Commons before the next federal election. Given the Conservatives’ repeated statements that Canada’s spies have enough oversight, such an effort is unlikely to succeed.

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“I’m not going to hold up much hope, as we speak,” Segal said.

“They’ve been very clear to date that more oversight is more bureaucracy. And this is not about bureaucracy.”

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