Do Canadians expect the police, security services and border guards to share information about possible threats to the country? Of course. We’ve had our share of attacks on Parliament and the military, conspiracies to bomb public sites and other threats. There’s no room for complacency.

But our defences are robust, and growing. And on Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s watch, an oversight gap has widened that needs to be plugged.

Ottawa now spends more than $6 billion a year on the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canada Border Services Agency, the prison service and other security agencies. Collectively, they employ 52,000 people. This year’s budget earmarked $300 million more.

Yet for all that our security services are forever lobbying to expand their ambit, as the Star’s Alex Boutilier reports. Just last year CSIS and the CBSA proposed that Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney authorize them to make “specific arrangements” to share personnel and resources, and to swap information, “without the necessity to seek your approval each time,” as CSIS director Michel Coulombe put it in a memo. It’s a troubling revelation.

Whatever practical interest CSIS and CBSA may have had in pushing such a change, it risked weakening Blaney’s direct ministerial accountability for and immediate oversight of activities by agencies under his control. And without Parliament’s input or approval. Given the secrecy surrounding the proposal it’s impossible to know whether this was a power grab or an innocuous bit of housekeeping.

What Canadians do know for a fact is that the heavy-handed Anti-Terrorism Act that received royal assent last month involves a lot more than housekeeping, and puts us on a slippery slope. It allows information-sharing on a scale that dwarfs what CSIS and CBSA appear to have been contemplating. And it is a threat to civil rights. It has been roundly decried by former prime ministers, former Supreme Court justices, the Canadian Bar Association and civil libertarians. One poll found that a clear majority of Canadians, 56 per cent, disapprove of the act while just 33 per cent support it. Already, there are calls for it to be rescinded.

The new law redefines threats to the “security of Canada” in the broadest possible fashion, potentially snaring all kinds of activists or dissidents. It gives CSIS a sweeping new mandate to actively disrupt threats. It gives judges the power to sanction CSIS violations of Charter rights including privacy, freedom of expression and security of the person. And it lets police arrest and detain people on the thin grounds that they believe a crime “may” occur.

It also authorizes not only CSIS and the CBSA but also the RCMP and other security services to share Canadians’ personal information with no fewer than 100 government ministries and agencies listed in the federal Privacy Act. That list runs the gamut from the justice department and the military to Canada Revenue, the Toronto Port Authority, the High Arctic Research Station, the Canadian Museum of Immigration, the Nunavut Water Board and the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, to cite a few. It’s overreach that puts personal privacy and data at risk.

This relentless expansion of the security services’ operations — openly through the Anti-Terrorism Act and covertly through interagency deals — is especially worrisome given the Harper government’s stubborn refusal to provide adequate oversight of the nation’s security regime.

Unlike the United States, Britain and other allies, Canada has no mechanism to have Parliament scrutinize the security services’ operations. And while CSIS has credible oversight, CBSA does not. The Senate national security committee recently called for robust civilian oversight of CBSA, plus a complaints watchdog.

In the U.S., President Barack Obama’s administration has just brought in legislation that aims to strike a better balance between national security and privacy rights by curtailing unfettered surveillance of phone records. Here in Canada we continue to build up the security state, absent meaningful oversight and accountability. That’s something we ought to talk about in the coming election.

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