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Judges, not to mention citizens who may never know the source of misfortunes covertly visited upon them, are dependent on review bodies. “Review” is an audit of past performance, to ensure compliance with law and policy. CSIS’s review body is SIRC. The idea that SIRC review is adequate and enhanced review is needless red tape is simply wrong, and reflects an attitude that would be concerning even if the consequences of inaction were not potentially so significant.

SIRC is incapable of reviewing all of CSIS’s activities, or even CSIS’s conduct under its existing warrants. A necessarily partial approach to review will be spread even thinner as CSIS’s powers expand.

SIRC has inadequate legal powers for a post-9/11 world

The issue is not Arthur Porter, SIRC’s disgraced former chair, or (not just) the fact that SIRC has been short-handed for long periods. It is not only that it has a 17-person staff and a $3 million budget. It is that SIRC has inadequate legal powers for a post-9/11 world.

In 2013, then SIRC Chair Chuck Strahl candidly and colourfully told the Senate that “the trail is not going to stop nicely and neatly at CSIS’s door. … Other agencies … are working closely with CSIS, and increasingly we’re going to need some way of chasing those threads. Otherwise, we’ll have to tell parliamentarians that, as far as we can tell, everything looks great in CSIS country, but we don’t know what happened over that fence; you’re on your own.”

The Arar Commission recommended that “statutory gateways” be created allowing SIRC to share secret information and conduct joint investigations with Canada’s two other existing independent national security review bodies. The government has not acted on this report, or the Privacy Commissioner’s 2014 report that its powers were inadequate to review security information sharing — and information sharing is to be dramatically increased under C-51.