Is the Canadian government spying on our phone calls and emails? Can it offer some credible reassurance that it isn’t? And is Ottawa swapping this data with American or other spy services?

Those would be troubling questions at any time. But it’s downright alarming to hear them being raised in Parliament by New Democratic Party Leader Tom Mulcair and his team — who clearly feel they are being kept in the dark. If the official Opposition isn’t in the loop, who is?

In Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s absence, Defence Minister Peter MacKay did his best on Monday to tamp down concern over a report that he has issued ministerial directives, without benefit of parliamentary oversight, that authorize the ultrasecret Communications Security Establishment Canada to monitor phone calls and Internet activity for “metadata,” as did the Liberals earlier. CSEC has a “culture of compliance” with the law, he said, and can’t target Canadians, only foreign threats. That may well be.

But Canadians can be forgiven for wondering, amid the controversy that erupted in the United States last week over revelations that citizens there are under unheard-of scrutiny.

The scope of the American program, driven by a political obsession with terror that shows no sign of abating, is staggering. The security services are authorized to hoover up vast amounts of raw “telephony metadata” (the caller’s number and that of the other party, time of call, duration and other data, short of listening in on the conversations), to identify and track potential threats. And under another program called PRISM they can scour the main U.S. Internet companies for emails, audio, video and other materials from non-Americans living abroad. That would catch most Canadians who rely heavily on the major servers in the net.

As the Star noted in this space on Sunday, Canadians might well wonder how much surreptitious surveillance goes on here as well. Given the official secrecy, it’s impossible to know. But people are suddenly waking up to the implications — as is the office of Canada’s privacy commissioner, which says developments on both sides of the border raise “significant concerns” about the balance between security and privacy. “Oversight of CSEC is really thin” considering its $400-million-plus budget and 2,000 staff, says Ronald Deibert, director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. A single retired judge serves as CSEC commissioner with a tiny watchdog staff.

Moreover, the problem is compounded by what University of Ottawa security expert Wesley Wark described in a report last year to the privacy commissioner as the “poor” state of public awareness on security issues. “Privacy is threatened in the absence of an appropriate level of knowledge about national security institutions and practices, in the absence of clear government statements and actions in its defence, and in fuzzy law-making,” he warned.

For these reasons it’s good to see Parliament beginning to sniff around this issue. Striking the right balance between privacy and security is important in any democracy. We shouldn’t have to turn ourselves into a police state to combat terror.

As awareness of the stakes builds, so should Parliament’s resolve to take an aggressive interest to get the “checks and balances” right, in Deibert’s words.

Should the Canadian government be in the business of snooping into the communications of law-abiding citizens, directly or indirectly, on the off chance that a bad actor might turn up? Are these measures justified or have we overstepped? Is our oversight of the CSEC and other agencies sufficiently robust or does it need to be strengthened? To what degree do Canada’s data-aggregation methods mirror those in the U.S.? Is Parliament adequately briefed, as key members of Congress are? Once data is collected, can it be transmitted to foreign services? Under what safeguards? And do our laws clearly spell out all this?

We badly need a spirited debate along these lines, and some healthy public consciousness-raising. It’s not reassuring to see opposition MPs rise in Parliament to confirm that they’re stumbling around in the dark.