Defence Minister Peter MacKay says the country’s top-secret eavesdropping agency is barred from spying on Canadians. He is wrong.

In fact, the little-known Communications Security Establishment Canada is specifically mandated to intercept telephone or Internet communications involving Canadians — as long as it does so in an effort to gather foreign intelligence.

Indeed, when CSEC does think its snooping activities might ensnare Canadians — or even non-citizens who happen to be in Canada — it is required by law to get authorization from the defence minister. In 2011-12, the last year for which figures are available, eight such ministerial authorizations — all of unknown size and scope — were in play.

So when MacKay says, as he did in the Commons on Monday, that “this program is specifically prohibited from looking at the information of Canadians,” he is either woefully forgetful or oddly inaccurate.

Even the snooping agency’s website highlights CSEC’s new authority to eavesdrop on communications between foreigners outside Canada and people within the country, an authority granted it by Parliament through the anti-terrorism law of 2002. No judicial warrant is required for such interceptions.

However, the agency may make these domestic, warrantless interceptions only if its main target is foreign. Which is what allows government spokespeople to say that CSEC does not “target” Canadians.

The sad truth of the post-9/11 world is that all liberal democratic governments spy on their own and neighbouring citizens.

The equally sad truth is that all use weasel words such as “target” to obscure what they are doing.

This week, the media have been consumed by stories of massive U.S. electronic snooping programs operated by the National Security Agency, that country’s equivalent to CSEC. Canadians are deemed at risk because so much of this country’s telecommunications go through the U.S.

But Canadians have long been at risk from having their telephone conversations and emails monitored by the NSA. The U.S. agency needs a warrant from a secret court to spy on its citizens. It needs no authorization of any kind to spy on Canadians.

As former Liberal solicitor-general Wayne Easter told my colleague Tonda MacCharles, during his time in government the NSA routinely passed on information about Canadians to Canada — through either CSEC itself or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service or the RCMP.

Technically, according to CSEC Commissioner Robert Décary, this shouldn’t happen. A former federal court judge whose current job is to monitor CSEC, Décary writes in his most recent annual report that the agency is prohibited from asking its foreign partners to provide information it cannot legally collect on its own.

But Easter says it has been common practice. And as the man who used to be responsible for the RCMP and CSIS, he presumably knows.

Does Canada’s eavesdropping agency collect metadata — that is, information about information, such as when a telephone call is made or which IP address is used to send email?

Certainly it did. In his 2006-07 report on CSEC, then-commissioner Charles Gonthier wrote that he was about to conduct a review of CSEC’s “use of metadata.”

And in his 2010-11 report, current commissioner Décary wrote that CSEC may collect “information about Canadians” without getting ministerial (or judicial) authorization if it believes that information would be useful in identifying a foreign intelligence threat.

What exactly is “information about Canadians”? Décary carefully doesn’t say. But he does say this particular effort is guided by something called a “ministerial directive” issued by the minister of defence — currently MacKay.

In the world of surveillance bureaucracy, where shades of nuance matter, a ministerial “directive” is different from and involves less onerous preconditions than a ministerial “authorization.”

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In short, you may not be paranoid. There’s good chance they are watching you.

If it helps, they all insist they’re doing it for the best of reasons.