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If laughter really is the best medicine, then I have to thank Christian Leuprecht. His appearance before a Commons committee this week on Bill C-51 had me laughing so hard I won’t need to see a doctor again for years.

Leuprecht, an associate professor at the Royal Military College, appeared before the Public Safety and National Security Committee to offer an impersonation of someone who knows what he’s talking about.

Prof. Leuprecht may have the academic credentials, but his gut-busting remarks demonstrate he doesn’t have a clue about what really goes on inside the Canadian Security Intelligence Service — nor the contempt the spy agency has for anyone in or outside government who tries to keep serious tabs on what it’s up to.

Still, he’s got a good seat on the media pundit merry-go-around circuit these days, where he offers gullible producers and reporters the national security equivalent of a climate change “skeptic” to “debate” the bill’s opponents. And he was treated with predictable deference by Conservative committee chair MP Daryl Kramp and that Joe McCarthy manqué, Diane Ablonczy.

Leuprecht began his stand-up routine testimony with an empty rhetorical flourish: “Security is like the air we breathe. You don’t realize that it’s gone until it’s too late.” (You could say the same about civil rights, but I digress.)

“I’d also like to point out,” he continued, “the hypocrisy of perhaps some of the (bill’s) critics and perhaps some of the ignorance of some of the professionalism of the security agencies and those who work in our national security system and the accountabilities that are in place.” For good measure, he called the bill’s critics “naïve.”

Stick and stones. Here’s the big difference between Prof. Leuprecht and me: I have never relied on CSIS-approved talking points to find out what takes place inside CSIS. Instead, I talked to a lot of the grunts inside the spy service – some of whom were so appalled by what they saw on the job that they promptly headed for the exit because they wanted no part of the rampant drinking, lying, laziness, corruption and, yes, law-breaking.

Much of what they told me landed on the front page of a national newspaper and made its way into my book about CSIS, Covert Entry.

Here’s just one of the many stories I told that put the lie to Prof. Leuprecht’s silly, pollyanish claims about the “professionalism” of Canada’s spy service and how CSIS is — get this — “the most reviewed intelligence service … in the world”:

Picture it. An ambitious CSIS officer is up for promotion. To prepare, she secretly takes home the spy service’s crown jewel: a document that lays out every detail of CSIS’s counter-terrorism and counter-espionage battle plans for the coming year.

I tried to connect the dots to find out what actually happened. I quickly discovered that ‘losing’ sensitive documents in odd places and times was pretty common at CSIS at the time. I tried to connect the dots to find out what actually happened. I quickly discovered that ‘losing’ sensitive documents in odd places and times was pretty common at CSIS at the time.

Curiously, she leaves the prized document in a briefcase in a van while she watches a hockey game at a suburban Toronto hockey rink on a Saturday night. The document disappears — but she doesn’t report its absence until the following Tuesday, when she returns to CSIS HQ in Ottawa.

Frantic, CSIS effectively shuts down all of its counter-espionage and counter-terrorism operations in Toronto to try to find the document. It never did. I found out about it. A CSIS PR guy confirmed the story, saying the lost document constituted the “most serious security breach” in the agency’s history.

I called Paule Gauthier — a Quebec City-based lawyer and the then-chair of the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), CSIS’s anemic review agency — for comment. News to her. Ward Elcock, the CSIS director at the time, hadn’t bothered to tell Gauthier that the spy service had lost its crown jewel. She had to hear it from a reporter.

How’s that for accountability, Mr. Leuprecht?

Here’s where the story gets even more bizarre. CSIS claimed that three “drug addicts” were responsible for the document’s loss. The document supposedly ended up in a landfill somewhere — “irretrievably lost,” the CSIS PR guy told me.

CSIS’s cover story was full of holes, to put it diplomatically. First, CSIS claimed that “great police work” had been instrumental in nabbing said junkies. (To my knowledge, not one of them was ever identified or charged.) I contacted every police force in Toronto and vicinity, asking if they had given our inept spooks a hand finding their lost spy plans. They all said no.

Even if the cops had helped CSIS out, what (I asked myself) was the likelihood of finding the thieves and the document given that the slipshod CSIS officer in question (who was married to a cop and subsequently fired) waited days before telling her bosses at CSIS that she had lost it?

I tried to connect the dots to find out what actually happened. I quickly discovered that ‘losing’ sensitive documents in odd places and times was pretty common at CSIS at the time.

Exhibit B: Another CSIS officer left a computer disk brimming with “top secret” stuff — possibly the names of informants — in a phone booth at a busy uptown Toronto intersection. A passerby found the disk. I tracked him down and he told me that he easily opened the files (they weren’t encrypted) and briefly considered selling the information to the highest bidder before giving it back to CSIS.

Later, I learned of the mother of all security breaches — a drug-addicted senior CSIS officer who dealt secrets to Mafia associates. I devoted a chapter of my book to it, but here’s the Coles notes version:

A mafia-hit-man-turned-police-informant was having a cappuccino at a mobster hang out in west-end Toronto when a middle-aged man with curly hair and a tan walked in looking for smack. He bought his heroin and retreated to a washroom to get high.

When he emerged, he informed the mafia-hit-man-turned-police-informant that he worked for CSIS and that maybe they could do business together. He instructed his new drug-dealing pal to go to his car and get a briefcase that belonged to yet another apparently absent-minded CSIS employee. Inside, the informant found a stash of CSIS documents. Together, the CSIS officer and the informant hatched a plot to blackmail the CSIS targets named in the documents.

I found the informant and his Toronto police handler and they both confirmed (on the record) the whole disturbing story — one which CSIS did its best to sweep under the rug, like all the other dirt it conceals from SIRC and the Canadian people. (By the way, the informant scored major brownie points with the Mob-busting cops when he gave them the documents, which they, in turn, handed back to CSIS in exchange for a finder’s fee.)

Remember all of this the next time Mr. Leuprecht and the other Bill C-51 apologists pop up in the media, spouting nonsense about how SIRC is up to the job and CSIS is a world-class intelligence service which does everything by the book. Do what I do: Laugh … and change the channel.

Andrew Mitrovica is a writer and journalism instructor. For much of his career, Andrew was an investigative reporter for a variety of news organizations and publications including the CBC’s fifth estate, CTV’s W5, CTV National News — where he was the network’s chief investigative producer — the Walrus magazine and the Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the newspaper’s investigative unit. During the course of his 23-year career, Andrew has won numerous national and international awards for his investigative work.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.