Before getting into the report’s findings however, it is important to know a bit about the group that released it. The National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) is not a parliamentary committee (which does the work of the legislature) but a committee of parliamentarians — an executive body of the government that happens to be staffed by parliamentarians. It’s the fulfillment of a campaign promise by the Liberals in 2015 to create an “all-party committee to monitor and oversee the operations of every government department and agency with national security responsibilities.”

NSICOP has 11 members, eight members of parliament (MPs) and three senators that come from the official political parties in the House of Commons as well as the Senate. Under section 8 of the NSICOP Act, it has the mandate to review a) legislative, regulatory, policy, administrative and financial framework for national security and intelligence, b) the activities of a department that relate to national security and intelligence (unless deemed too injurious to national security by the minister of that department) and c) any matter relating to national security or anything the Crown (government) refers to the committee.

Beyond a campaign promise, there were good reasons to establish such a committee. Canada was one of the few Western countries to have no legislative review of its national security and intelligence agencies. But more than being an anomaly, this situation also left MPs (who have no security clearances) in a poor position to question security and intelligence officials in parliamentary hearings. Worse, it left them with little avenue to understand the increasingly complex national security issues Canada is facing.

Finally, while some national security and intelligence agencies had their own review bodies (for example, the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, or CSIS, is reviewed by the Security and Intelligence Review Committee, or SIRC), their ability to review is limited to one agency only — SIRC, for example, can only see what CSIS does, not what the national security and intelligence community does with information that CSIS provides them. Further, review bodies in Canada have been restricted to assessing adherence to law and policy and not efficacy (whether they were doing their job well).

In this sense NSICOP fulfills three important roles. First, it reviews any department or agency with any national security responsibilities to assess whether they are doing their jobs well and/or if there is room for improvement. Second, it provides unprecedented transparency into the Canadian national security and intelligence community — something important for all liberal democracies to strive for. Third, it provides an educative function to other MPs, but also the Canadian public on the security and intelligence community.