Jody Thomas retired in 2024 as national security and intelligence adviser to the Prime Minister. She is now a senior adviser with Counsel Public Affairs.

Patrick Lennox is an associate fellow of the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary, and a former national security practitioner.

The 2025 federal budget seeks to prepare us for a more Machiavellian world. That’s evident in its historic investments in national defence and security – an additional $81.8-billion over the next five years – and its pledges to push us to the NATO target of devoting 2 per cent of GDP to defence spending in 2025-26.

But spending big is one thing. Spending wisely and with a clear purpose beyond reaching an arbitrary benchmark is another.

The stewards of this investment must ensure that it makes Canada significantly more self-reliant and resilient in the face of a deeply destabilized world. There are many elements to this, but an essential one appears missing from the government’s plans: the establishment of a foreign human intelligence service for Canada.

Opinion: Canada needs a foreign human intelligence service

Historically, Canadian governments have resisted calls to create such a service. The prevailing view on the matter is that Canada hasn’t suffered from a lack of a foreign intelligence capability to date, so there’s no obvious need to build one. It would be a costly, difficult and risky endeavour. The juice, in other words, wouldn’t be worth the squeeze.

But if we’ve never had the juice, how would we know? That’s the problem with the dominant view on this. We don’t know what Canada has been missing when it comes to a foreign intelligence capability because we never took the steps necessary to find out.

It’s true that Canada has been able to coast along without this capability to this point. We have relied on our Five Eyes partners to share their products collected and analyzed for their own purposes with us. Our diplomats have filled gaps through their reporting. We’ve excelled at foreign signals intelligence and allowed CSIS to collect security intelligence abroad. But in the storm of the current geopolitical environment, this approach is quickly becoming a glaring vulnerability. Our sovereignty and resilience demand that we discover and know for ourselves what’s happening to us in the world.

As the budget notes in its introductory paragraph, the “nexus between energy security, economic security, and national security is clearer than ever before.” This complex national security landscape, the economic and hybrid warfare our adversaries are waging, and the unstable relationship we have with the United States – whose foreign intelligence capability we have long been reliant upon – leave us exposed like never before. Sticking our heads in the sand and hoping the storm passes is not an acceptable strategy.

In a world as fluid, noisy and unstable as we are in now, not having an all-source intelligence capability to support crucial policy decisions is a major disadvantage. It risks undermining the government’s entire generational investment by leaving us vulnerable to blind spots, deception and manipulation by both our adversaries and allies alike.

Opinion: I, spy: Does Canada need a foreign intelligence service?

Therefore, establishing a foreign human intelligence capability should be a priority. The government could build a stand-alone agency or expand the capabilities and mandates of existing ones. Both would be costly and time-consuming, especially the former; both would be disruptive for a bureaucracy that’s facing deep cuts. But as the government has said about major projects and defence investments, the fact that a challenge is hard should not be an excuse for inaction or complacency.

Canadians have had this conversation before, and both Liberal and Conservative governments have entertained the idea in the past. This time, however, must be different. The budget’s talk of “generational investments” to “meet the moment” and “build Canada strong,” as well as its large increases to defence spending, signal a level of ambition required to finally break through our past indecision. We hope that the bureaucracy is already considering the issue, putting viable options on the table for the government to pursue. If they aren’t, the Prime Minister should insist they do. We shouldn’t let this question fade away again without serious consideration.

Setting up a foreign human intelligence capability would be a massive undertaking. It would test the limits of Canadian ingenuity and guile. It would be one of the hardest things this country has ever done. It would be fraught with risk and put us in uncomfortable moral territory. And it would necessitate a fundamental rearchitecting of Canada’s security and intelligence community. But it would prepare Canada for our fast-changing, increasingly self-interested world, which is ultimately what the Carney government’s generational investment is all about.