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If you’ve convinced yourself that parliamentary oversight is the magic bullet to keep Canada’s wayward spies in check, you might as well believe in fairies and unicorns while you’re at it.

Take a few minutes to listen to the February 23 meeting of the Public Safety and National Security Committee (There’s no video because the hearings on Tuesday weren’t televised. Welcome to 2016, everyone.) The marquee witnesses that day were RCMP Commissioner Rob Paulson and CSIS Director Michel Coulombe.

Now, your first clue to the fact that this House committee isn’t exactly a forum for dazzling policy insight is in the makeup of the committee itself. Tory MP Larry Miller — that bright, sensitive soul who once bellowed at a local radio audience that niqab-wearing women should “stay the hell where (they) came from” — is the committee’s vice-chair.

Miller, thankfully, didn’t question either witness, but a few of his committee colleagues did … badly. And while an ill-prepared and exasperated Paulson got the rod, Coulombe might as well have been doing a crossword puzzle, he had such an easy time of it.

(To my knowledge, the last time a CSIS director got an even remotely rough ride at a parliamentary committee hearing was way back in May 1999, when then Progressive Conservative justice critic, Peter MacKay, had a testy exchange with Ward Elcock over who gets to decide what the amorphous phrase “national security” means when it comes to answering questions posed by MPs. Not surprisingly, the accountability-allergic CSIS director told MacKay to buzz off.)

Paulson and Coulombe devoted much of their opening statements to giving the committee a sanitized history lesson about what the Mounties and CSIS do for a living that could have been cribbed from their respective websites. Riveting.

With that out of the way, the MPs began their questioning. Paulson was asked several questions about the scandal du jour staining the national police force’s already grievously damaged reputation — incidents of sexual harassment and bullying at the Canadian Police College. Paulson tried to convince the committee that he was on top of the situation.

“Yeah, we had a bullying problem, there is no question about that, and we are working on that, and recent events notwithstanding, I am here to tell you we are doing better at it,” Paulson said.

Believe it or not — and I had a hard time believing it myself — no one on the committee asked Coulombe a single question about CSIS’s traffic in purloined tax records. Believe it or not — and I had a hard time believing it myself — no one on the committee asked Coulombe a single question about CSIS’s traffic in purloined tax records.

Coulombe, in his opening statement, insisted that CSIS takes accountability seriously. In particular, he noted that CSIS seeks “ministerial approval … for warrant application from the federal court (and that it operates) within the rule of law.”

If that’s true, I wonder why no one on the committee asked Coulombe why he’s still CSIS director?

Why hasn’t he resigned, given the fact that SIRC, the service’s review agency, recently reported that CSIS repeatedly obtained the tax records of an untold number of Canadians without bothering to get a judicial warrant — and that our spooks kept the records despite claiming they had destroyed them?

I wonder why no one on the committee asked Coulombe why he failed to follow the honourable example of Ted Finn, CSIS’s first director? Finn quit after he learned that a CSIS officer provided false information in support of a warrant to wiretap a key Air India bombing suspect. In doing so, Finn drew an ethical line in the sand. In the years since Finn’s resignation, that line has been erased by a succession of CSIS directors. Which is why, today, CSIS officers apparently don’t feel obliged to make an effort to get a warrant before getting their hands on legally protected tax records.

I wonder why no one on the committee asked Coulombe to respond to recent remarks by the highly respected former inspector general for CSIS, Eva Plunkett? She told iPolitics that Coulombe should be held to account and asked some pointed questions about what his officers have been up to in the dark.

Believe it or not — and I had a hard time believing it myself — no one on the committee asked Coulombe a single question about CSIS’s traffic in purloined tax records. Instead, former Veterans Affairs minister Erin O’Toole wasted time chiding Liberal MP Nathanial Erskine-Smith for being unaware that CSIS has “no arrest powers” … and over his private member’s bill on shark’s fin soup.

NDP MP and co-vice chair Matthew Dubé asked Paulson and Coulombe about their anti-radicalization efforts and seemed quite content with their anodyne replies. (“Fantastic,” he said.) The easily-impressed Dubé seems to have forgotten that Paulson pulled the plug on the RCMP’s support for a handbook produced by the National Council of Canadian Muslims and the Islamic Social Services Association that was designed to stop young Muslim Canadians from joining extremist terror groups. Oh well.

To be fair, the committee’s muted response to CSIS getting up to its old, dirty tricks was mirrored by Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale’s own indifference. Goodale wasted no time finding a microphone on the Hill to describe the goings-on at the police college as an “embarrassment” and call for a swift investigation. But, like the members of the committee, Goodale has kept mostly silent about allegations of serious misconduct by CSIS.

He hasn’t said a word about the pressing need for a police probe to address a slew of still unanswered questions about how CSIS got hold of Canadians’ tax records. Rather, Goodale has been musing publicly about establishing a new, parliamentary national security committee, modeled after some of our Commonwealth partners, to keep our spooks on a tight leash.

Like hell it will.

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.