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The Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies (CASIS) announces the 5th annual competition for the CASIS Essay Prize, supported by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Prizes will be awarded for the best undergraduate and graduate papers on a subject dealing with intelligence or on a matter related to Canada’s broad national security interests.
The Award
One graduate and one undergraduate paper will be awarded. The graduate prize is $2500, while the undergraduate prize is $1000. Both winners will be invited to deliver their papers at a CASIS event in 2026, and both papers will be published on-line through the CASIS website.
Eligibility Criteria
The competition is open to undergraduate or graduate students enrolled at a Canadian university or college, or any Canadian student enrolled at a university or college outside of Canada. Papers submitted as part of a course requirement and papers specifically designed for this contest are welcome. Submissions can be in English or French. Only one paper per candidate will be accepted for the competition.
Topics
Essays must address some dimension of intelligence, security, or law enforcement issues in any time period and in any country. Submissions can be from any Humanities or Social Sciences discipline, inter-disciplinary programmes, or law school. Essays touching on the following topics are encouraged, but will not receive preferential grading:
Submission
Undergraduate essays cannot exceed 30 pages including footnotes. Graduate papers cannot exceed 40 pages including notes. Submissions should be sent by email with a clear subject heading reading “CASIS-CSIS Prize”, graduate or undergraduate level, and the author’s last name: i.e. CASIS-CSIS Prize – undergraduate – Doe, Jane.
Submissions must be in Microsoft Word, 12-point font, double spaced, and must include a full title page with the author's name, institution, academic programme, and contact information. Proof of registration at a University in Canada or abroad (transcript or certification) is required, and proof of citizenship may be required for students studying outside of Canada. Send an electronic copy of the paper to:
akislenk@torontomu.ca
The deadline for submissions is Monday, June 1, 2026.
Adjudication
All submissions will be adjudicated by a panel comprised of academics and representatives of the CSIS Academic Outreach & Stakeholder Engagement (AOSE) program. The review process will commence in June 2026, with results announced via email in August.
About CASIS
CASIS is a non-partisan, voluntary association established in 1985. Its principal purpose is to provide informed debate in Canada on security and intelligence issues. Membership is open and includes academics, concerned citizens, government officials, journalists, lawyers, students, as well as former intelligence officers.
About CSIS AOSE
The Academic Outreach & Stakeholder Engagement program is an important bridge linking CSIS to Canadians. The program engages with stakeholders and thought leaders on national security issues from across Canada and around the world to ensure that CSIS’ work is informed by a broad and diverse spectrum of voices and perspectives.
Nigel Farage’s party is “very interested” in taking up the intelligence agency’s offer to help with national security checks.
A Reform UK spokesman said: “If this offer comes to fruition, we would be very interested in taking the MI5 up on it.
Politico Magazine March 11, 2026 4:00 am CETBy Mason Boycott-Owen
LONDON — Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has welcomed an offer from MI5 to help political parties vet their election candidates as hostile states try to infiltrate British democracy.
Last month MI5 — Britain’s domestic intelligence agency — said it would help political parties with candidate checks for potential foreign interference risks.
A Reform spokesman told POLITICO the party would be “very interested” in taking up the offer, if it “comes to fruition.”
Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, made the offer at a cross-party briefing with U.K. political parties last month, alongside Security Minister Dan Jarvis, three people with knowledge of the meeting told POLITICO. The offer from McCallum is part of a wider effort by the U.K. government and security services to shore up British democracy amid a wave of espionage activity from hostile states. In the past six months, several foreign and U.K.-born citizens have been arrested on suspicion of working for Iran, Russia and China. Earlier this month three former Labour officials, including the husband of a sitting Labour MP and former candidate for North Wales police and crime commissioner, were arrested by counter-terrorism police on suspicion of spying for China. Last year, the former Reform UK leader in Wales Nathan Gill was jailed for accepting bribes to make pro-Russian statements while he was a member of the EU parliament for Reform’s precursor Brexit Party. Britain’s political parties have no standardized system for vetting those who want to become MPs. Each party has its own internal, and in some cases, external processes for probity checks.
Reform leader Nigel Farage in 2024 blamed a “reputable vetting company” for oversights in helping sift its candidates ahead of the general election after one praised Hitler and backed Russia’s war in Ukraine. He apologized, adding: “We have been stitched up politically and that’s given us problems.” MI5’s role in vetting is limited to its own staff and certain levels of security clearance for specific government and official roles in Whitehall. Its offer to candidates is expected to be limited to helping parties assess foreign interference risks, rather than any official security clearance. POLITICO asked the six main Westminster parties if they will take MI5 up on its offer to assist in their vetting processes. The ruling Labour Party, the Conservatives, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats all declined to comment. The Scottish National Party did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The offer from Ken McCallum is part of a wider effort by the U.K. government and security services to shore up British democracy amid a wave of espionage activity from hostile states.
A Reform UK spokesman said: “If this offer comes to fruition, we would be very interested in taking the MI5 up on it. “We must do all we can to stamp out foreign interference in our politics. We have seen just last week with the Labour China spy scandal just how deeply embedded this issue is.” The government unveiled its Counter Political Interference and Espionage Action Plan last November. It includes an elections bill, which is currently making its way through parliament. An independent review into financial interference in U.K. democracy is examining the use of cryptocurrency. Ministers are also considering bringing in proscription-like powers to disrupt proxies and state-backed terror groups as part of the plan. A Government spokesperson said: “The Security Minister is coordinating an action plan to ensure we’re doing all we can to safeguard our democracy, including working directly with political parties to help them detect and deter interference and espionage. “We’re also strengthening rules on political funding, rolling out security advice for election candidates, and working with professional networking sites and think tanks to make them a more hostile operating environment for foreign agents.”
Christo Grozev, Roman Dobrokhotov, Michael Weiss, Fidelius Schmid, Nikolai Antoniadis THE INSIDER In collaboration with Der Spiegel.
Center 795, which emerged after the start of Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine and comprises elite units from the GRU and FSB, was established as a top-secret and fully autonomous entity designed to carry out the most critical operations, ranging from military missions in Ukraine to political assassinations and abductions abroad."
The mainstream media has been stating that a phishing campaign where scammers are pretending to be Hydro-Québec to commit fraud is "associated with the Iranian state."While it makes a better headline given the current conflict with Iran, at this time, it appears to be a significant stretch to tie this specific incident to the Iranian government.In the Hydro-Québec case, the Iranian link is being made because researchers traced the scam to Cloudzy infrastructure. What isn't being highlighted is that Cloudzy has been used by over a dozen other state-sponsored actors (including China, Russia, and North Korea) and countless criminal bad actors. This is due to the fact that the company only requires an email for signup and accepts cryptocurrency, enabling total anonymity.While Cloudzy's CEO has ties to Iran and the Iranian state has likely used its infrastructure in the past, this doesn't automatically make all activity from this dubious network state-sponsored. Cloudzy is widely known in the cybersecurity community as a "Command-and-Control Provider" (C2P) that deliberately facilitates global ransomware, phishing, and financial fraud by offering anonymous hosting with virtually no oversight or response to abuse complaints.True Iranian state-sponsored actors like Handala and Nasir Security are engaging in destructive and disruptive cyberattacks, such as widespread data wiping and infrastructure sabotage, while this incident aligns far more closely with simple criminal fraud.
https://cyberagroup.com/
CBC News - Peter Zimonjic Mar 12, 2026
Minister of Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree and Justice Minister Sean Fraser say newly introduced lawful access legislation will help police and security services track and identify people suspected of criminality and threats to national security.
The Liberal government has introduced a new lawful access bill that it says will help police and security services track and identify people who may be using tools like social media or artificial intelligence to commit crimes or threaten national security.
This legislation is the government's most recent crack at broadening the access law enforcement agencies have after Bill C-2, introduced last spring, raised concerns with civil liberties groups that the powers went too far.
Minister of Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree said the reforms in the bill will bring the country's lawful access laws up to date, which he said are currently "woefully behind" Canada's allies.
"Bill C-22 balances the needs of law enforcement with the privacy and civil rights that Canadians demand," he said on Thursday.
"It is not about surveillance of Canadians going on about their daily lives. It is about keeping Canadians safe in the online space."
In a technical briefing, government officials explained that Bill C-22 doesn't give police or the security services access to people's browsing or private social media history, their messages or emails, but is limited to information that identifies who and where they are.
It will allow security services to compel telecoms like Bell and Rogers to provide them with a yes or no answer when asked if a suspected criminal uses their services.
If police want to get more information, such as a suspect's email address, phone number or home address, they must convince a court that a crime has taken place, or will take place, in order to get a warrant.
The legislation also formalizes how Canadian law enforcement make information requests to foreign social media companies like Meta and artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, which created ChatGPT.
The process does not compel AI or social media companies to share information identifying subscribers, but it provides a legal framework that government officials explained encourages these companies to work with police and security services.
The legislation also does not require AI or social media companies to report suspicious or worrying activity to Canadian authorities.
The type of information law enforcement would be looking for from these companies include IP addresses of suspects who are using false identities on social media to commit crimes, the officials said.
The legislation also gives the government the power to introduce regulations requiring "core providers" — a term that will be defined later through consultations but will include telecoms, satellite providers and "others" — to maintain the capacity to geographically track the users of its products and services.
According to the legislation, the definition of a device broadly includes computer programs on that device which cause "the computer system to perform a function."
The government says that while the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) can already get a warrant to track a suspect's mobile phone location, the mobile service provider is not required to track where all its users are.
Once that tracking capability is mandatory, Canada's security services would be able to make a legal request to access that software in order to investigate criminals and threats to national security.
Officials said that if CSIS wanted to track a terror suspect, for example, its agents are often forced to physically track them in person at great expense to the federal government, limiting how many operations they can undertake.
The changes, officials say, would also help emergency services locate people who are injured or lost more quickly than trying to triangulate them using cellphone towers.
Minister of Justice Sean Fraser said law enforcement needs the capacity to unearth who is behind an account that is being used to threaten public safety.
"This is going to help us catch up with most of our allies across the world, but most importantly it's going to help the officers on the front line do more to keep communities safe," Fraser said.
The legislation also gives the minister of public safety the power to issue a ministerial order compelling an electronic service provider, whether a core provider or not, to develop specific capabilities.
A background document explained that provision has been included to give ministers the ability, when needed, to respond to new threats or technologies. In order to issue an order it must first be approved by the intelligence commissioner.
Companies that refuse to conform to ministerial orders could be fined or face "administrative penalties," the document says.
When the Liberal government introduced Bill C-2, it contained a suite of measures that included tightening the asylum and immigration system, allowing mail to be searched and spending $1 billion on border security.
When more than 300 civil society organizations called on the Liberals to withdraw the bill, saying it threatened the freedom and privacy of all Canadians,the Liberals reintroduced some of its provisions under Bill C-12. That bill is now at third reading in the Senate.
Bill C-2 remains stuck at second reading in the House of Commons.
A senior officer in the counterespionage unit of Australia’s premier spy agency ASIO has been exposed as a secret KGB mole, who stole and sold highly classified intelligence to the Russians for at least five years.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation program Four Corners has forensically threaded together decades of investigations to reveal the man’s identity. The breathtaking betrayal jeopardized Australia’s security relationship with the United States and Britain, key partners in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.
The mole’s identity has been kept from the Australian public for nearly 30 years.
The man “was a critical [KGB] asset” according to international intelligence expert Neil Fergus.
For at least two years in the late 1970s, the ASIO mole was the feared Russian spy agency’s only back door to American and British intelligence secrets.
“This was gold for them,” Fergus said.
The mole’s ASIO colleagues suspected nothing.
His name was Ian George Peacock.
View this 2023 ABC documentary for your insider’s account.
Mainstream media is reporting "a significant cyberattack against a U.S. company, a first since the war started". On March 11, the group Handala announced an attack against the U.S. medical tech giant, Stryker. Handala (also known as Handala Hack Team, Hatef, Hamsa) is a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group focused on politically motivated cyber campaigns targeting Israeli entities and organizations associated with Israel globally. The group has claimed responsibility for 148 attacks against Israeli interests since mid-2024.
Since the start of the US/Israel attacks against Iran on Feb. 28, Handala has claimed responsibility for 13 cyberattacks against Israeli interests, 1 UAE oil company, Saudi Aramco, and the US company Stryker. This is the first specific targeting by Handala against a US company. Handala stated it attacked Stryker as it is a "one of the key arms of the global Zionist lobby and a central ring in the 'New Epstein' chain." Stryker maintains ties to Israel through acquisitions like OrthoSpace in 2019 for rotator cuff implants and Stryker GI Ltd. (founded 1994), which develops endoscopic solutions. These operations support R&D and manufacturing in Israel. Handala claimed it impacted over 200,000 systems, servers, and mobile devices and stole 50 terabytes of data, shutting down Stryker's offices in 79 countries. While groups like Handala often exaggerate their success for psychological impact, early evidence suggests that Handala’s claims regarding the Stryker attack are significantly more credible than typical "hack-and-leak" bluster. The attackers likely gained administrative access to Microsoft Intune allowing them to issue a "wipe" command to thousands of company-managed laptops and mobile devices simultaneously. In relation to this attack, the group stated: "This is only the beginning of a new cyber chapter in cyber warfare. To all those plotting attacks on the infrastructure of the Axis of Resistance: The era of hit-and-run is over!"
By FRANK BAJAK
https://apnews.com/
May 23, 2024
ARLINGTON, Virginia (AP) — U.S. intelligence agencies are scrambling to embrace the AI revolution, convinced they’ll otherwise be smothered in data as sensor-generated surveillance tech further blankets the planet. They also need to keep pace with competitors, who are already using AI to seed social media platforms with deepfakes.
But the tech is young and brittle, and officials are acutely aware that generative AI is anything but tailor-made for a trade steeped in danger and deception.
Years before OpenAI’s ChatGPT set off the current generative AI marketing frenzy, U.S. intelligence and defense officials were experimenting with the technology. One contractor, Rhombus Power, used it to uncover fentanyl trafficking in China in 2019 at rates far exceeding human-only analysis. Rhombus would later predict Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine four months in advance with 80% certainty.
EMBRACING AI WON’T BE SIMPLE
CIA director William Burns recently wrote in Foreign Affairs that U.S. intelligence requires “sophisticated artificial intelligence models that can digest mammoth amounts of open-source and clandestinely acquired information.”
But the agency’s inaugural chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani, cautions that because generative AI models “hallucinate” they are best treated as a “crazy, drunk friend” — capable of incredible insight but also bias-prone fibbers.
There are also security and privacy issues. Adversaries could steal and poison them. They may contain sensitive personal data agents aren’t authorized to see.
Gen AI is mostly good as a virtual assistant, says Mulchandani, looking for “the needle in the needle stack.” What it won’t ever do, officials insist, is replace human analysts.
AN OPEN-SOURCE AI NAMED ‘OSIRIS’
While officials won’t say whether they are using generative AI for anything big on classified networks, thousands of analysts across the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies now use a CIA-developed generative AI called Osiris. It ingests unclassified and publicly or commercially available data — what’s known as open-source — and writes annotated summaries. It includes a chatbot so analysts can ask follow-up questions.
Osiris uses multiple commercial AI models. Mulchandani said the agency is not committing to any single model or tech vendor. “It’s still early days,” he said.
Experts believe predictive analysis, war-gaming and scenario brainstorming will be among generative AI’s most important uses for intel workers.
‘REGULAR AI’ ALREADY IN USE
Even before generative AI, intel agencies were using machine learning and algorithms. One use case: Alerting analysts during off hours to potentially important developments. An analyst could instruct an AI to ring their phone no matter the hour. It couldn’t describe what happened - that would be classified - but could say “you need to come in and look at this.”
AI bigshots vying for U.S. intelligence agency business include Microsoft, which announced on May 7 that it was offering OpenAI’s GPT-4 for top-secret networks, though the product is not yet accredited on classified networks.
A competitor, Primer AI, lists two intelligence agencies among its customers, documents posted online for recent military AI workshops show. One Primer product is designed to “detect emerging signals of breaking events” using AI-powered searches of more than 60,000 news and social media sources in 100 languages including Twitter, Telegram, Reddit and Discord.
Like Rhombus Power’s product, it helps analysts identify key people, organizations and locations and also uses computer vision. At a demo just days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Primer executives described how their technology separates fact from fiction in the flood of online information from the Middle East.
CHALLENGES AHEAD AS AI SPREADS
The most important near-term AI challenges for U.S. intelligence officials are apt to be counteracting how adversaries use it: To pierce U.S. defenses, spread disinformation and attempt to undermine Washington’s ability to read their intent and capabilities.
The White House is also concerned that generative AI models adopted by U.S. agencies could be infiltrated and poisoned.
Another worry: Ensuring the privacy of people whose personal data may be embedded in an AI model. Authorities say it is not currently possible to guarantee that’s all removed from an AI model.
That’s one reason the intelligence community is not in “move-fast-and-break-things” mode on generative AI, says John Beieler, the top AI official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Model integrity and security are a concern if government agencies end up using AIs to explore bio- and cyberweapons tech.
DIFFERENT AGENCIES, DIFFERENT AI MISSIONS
How AI gets adopted will vary widely by intelligence agency according to mission. The National Security Agency mostly intercepts communications. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is charged with seeing and understanding every inch of the planet.
Supercharging those missions with Gen AI is a priority — and much less complicated than, say, how the FBI might use the technology given its legal limitations on domestic surveillance.
The NGA issued in December a request for proposals for a completely new type of AI model that would use imagery it collects — from satellites, from ground-level sensors – to harvest precise geospatial intel with simple voice or text prompts. Gen AI applications also make a lot of sense for cyberconflict.
MATCHING WITS WITH RIVALS
Generative AI won’t easily match wits with rival masters of deception.
Analysts work with “incomplete, ambiguous, often contradictory snippets of partial, unreliable information,” notes Zachery Tyson Brown, a former defense intelligence officer. He believes intel agencies will invite disaster if they embrace generative AI too enthusiastically, swiftly or completely. The models don’t reason. They merely predict. And their designers can’t entirely explain how they work.
Linda Weissgold, a former CIA deputy director of analysis, doesn’t see AI replacing human analysts any time soon.
Quick decisions are often required based on incomplete data. Intelligence “customers’’ - the most important being the president of the United States — want human insight and experience central to the decision options they’re offered, she says.
“I don’t think it will ever be acceptable to some president for the intelligence community to come in and say, ‘I don’t know, the black box just told me so.’”
FRANK BAJAK
Bajak is an Associated Press technology reporter who focuses on hacking, privacy, surveillance and military AI.
Iwona Mooney
CSIS DDG (Ret.)
To have or not to have? In recent years there has been much speculation on the pros and cons of whether Canada should have a separate Foreign Intelligence organization, or should this responsibility be allocated to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), or perhaps housed within another government ministry. As a former intelligence professional with a passion for current events, international politics, I try to stay atop relevant information as it becomes available. I use the word “try”. So many weigh in with opinions and arguments, whether it be an informed source or a member of the public who feels they have the solution. I am from neither camp. I am writing from “my heart”, from experience, and from years of reading about and researching intelligence agencies, as well as following ongoing intelligence issues as impacted and/or influenced by various global conflicts.
Even though espionage is considered to be the second-oldest profession in the world, today in 2025, no intelligence organization can function using traditional spy craft of the 1900s. Post-World War II, the race for the atomic bomb, the heroic efforts of Igor Gouzenko to get “the West” to come to grip with the true realties of the now former U.S.S.R., and the devastating work of the Cambridge Five brought to a head the need to rethink how an intelligence entity deals with new security threats. The end of the Cold War era accelerated security intelligence priorities in areas unheard of before. Terrorism, international and domestic, is probably what comes to mind. Yet there are so many new variants of threats that have emerged and will continue to evolve. Cyber threats to governments, businesses and to individuals, are rampant. Transnational repression is a type of foreign interference that can be subtle ranging to violence. Regional conflicts based on religious and/or ethnic issues, which have been around for eons, do not seem to wane. They just move around the globe with waves of migration from continent to continent. And there are other issues, such as climate change, sabotage and counter proliferation.
What has changed? Attitudes, younger generations dissatisfaction with the current situation, religious factions having greater influences over the less fortunate, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few with the exponential rise of the oligarch / billionaire category. How does this all fit into the dialogue of whether Canada should or should not have its own separate foreign intelligence agency?
In 1984, CSIS was established primarily as a defensive intelligence organization to protect Canada’s national security interests as mandated by The CSIS Act. It collects information through human interaction, ergo – HUMINT – human intelligence. Its sister organization, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) is SIGINT-based, signals intelligence obtained through “ears in the skies”. Both organizations operate within Canada’s borders, but, yes, there is a BUT. These borders are a hindrance of sorts. Canada has been relying on the sharing of intelligence through its partnership within the Five Eyes alliance – United Kingdom, United States, Australia and New Zealand, as well as other countries. Some do have foreign intelligence agency capabilities; others deal with such collections as their laws allow. Recent events have strained some of these partnerships, putting Canada at a disadvantage.
The CSIS Act has been amended, the last being Bill C-70 (June 2024) to align its powers better to deal with the increase in, and changes within the current threat environment. However, it did not provide CSIS with a distinct, separate “foreign intelligence capability” that would allow intelligence operatives to work abroad. Federal court warrants can provide CSIS with the authority to conduct specific investigations abroad. These changes are a step in the right direction.
In 2003 the former Liberal Member of Parliament (Nepean) David Pratt tabled a private member’s bill – C-409, An Act to establish the Canadian Foreign intelligence Agency. As with the majority of private members’ bills, it did not pass. The idea was put forth and continues to have supporters and detractors. The security intelligence environment is an ever-evolving one and if Canada is to participate in a level playing field, perhaps the time has come for serious consideration to be given to the conundrum of whether Canada should or should not have a foreign intelligence agency of its own.
On the one hand, increasing substantially the funds to CSIS that would allow it to develop a “Foreign Intelligence Branch” within its organizational structure would seem to be the easier path to take. However, it begs the question of sustainability, of integrating it into the strategic operational environment without jeopardizing the “agents” who would choose to work abroad. Would these agents rotate in/out of the Service in order to “round” out their careers? Where would their operational mandates emanate from? These are just a few of the challenges that CSIS would face should it be given the foreign intelligence agency responsibility.
There are sound reasons why our allies have separate foreign intelligence services: The British have MI6, the Americans the CIA, Israel the Mossad, Germany the BND, France the DGSE, Australia the ASIS. Then there is Russia with the SVR, and China the MSS. Some are smaller in stature and others, like the CIA or MI6 are legendary in their own right.
Canada needs to focus on the WHY there may be need to have a permanent, separate foreign intelligence agency. Will it enhance its stature within the intelligence community? Will it allow Canada to focus specifically on those areas abroad where information cannot be otherwise gathered than through deploying agents? And how long will it take Canada to get such an agency up and running at full speed. Certainly, it is not an overnight exercise. Probably more like five if not more years before it would be fully operational. Does Canada have an appropriate human resources pool to hire suitable candidates, or does the initial round come from within CSIS and other Canadian intelligence-related entities? Once the WHY is answered then the rest should fall into place. A bill to enact a Canadian Foreign Intelligence Agency is already drafted, albeit would require updating. Changes in today’s world security environment show that Canada needs to be part of the playing field, not just a spectator on the sidelines. Some of these changes impact directly on Canada and going to the source of the “threat” to try and mitigate it may be the only way Canada will be able to deal with said threat. Our partners may not be of much assistance if they do not have a vested interest. To quote Lewis Carroll’s opening line in his poem, The Walrus and the Carpenter - “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things” – to have or not to have a separate foreign intelligence entity.
The Canadian Press
Published: March 08, 2026 at 8:06AM EDT
OTTAWA — The decades-long debate over whether Canada should create a CIA-style foreign spy agency has been coloured by pressure from allies, budgetary restraint and internal federal rivalries, a new study reveals.
Much of the discussion about Canada’s foreign intelligence aspirations has taken place — fittingly perhaps, given the subject matter — in classified memos and behind closed doors in the halls of government.
“To spy, or not to spy,” a new paper by researcher and former Canadian intelligence analyst Alan Barnes, draws on recently released archival records to trace the history of official thinking on the question from 1945 to 2007.
Ottawa’s fractious relations with Washington over the last year have prompted fresh conversations about whether Canada should have its own intelligence service that dispatches people abroad to covertly gather political, military and economic information.
An understanding of past deliberations about a Canadian foreign intelligence agency “is an important element of an informed public debate” on the question, said Barnes, a senior fellow at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs.
Barnes’ paper, published by the Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, explains how Canada’s cautious consideration of the idea of an international espionage service stretches back at least eight decades to the days following the Second World War.
During the war, Canada developed the ability to electronically collect signals intelligence, the Joint Intelligence Committee co-ordinated foreign intelligence activities and produced assessments, and the RCMP gathered information about domestic security threats.
Missing from the mix was an organization operating outside Canada to collect foreign intelligence clandestinely using human sources, similar to the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Barnes writes.
“Nevertheless, when officials were considering the shape of the post-war intelligence community, the idea of creating a foreign intelligence agency was in the air,” the paper says.
An SIS officer visited Ottawa in 1951 to discuss setting up a Canadian spy service with Britain’s assistance. That led to a proposal for a modestly scoped agency which, Barnes surmises, would have operated in the Caribbean. The plan was gradually scaled back and ultimately went nowhere.
“It was only the first such proposal to meet this fate,” the paper says.
Still, Canada was coming under increasing pressure from its allies to contribute more to the collective pool of intelligence information, Barnes writes.
The CIA informed Ottawa of an American interest in conducting interrogations in Canada of defectors and immigrants from the Soviet bloc.
“This galvanized the attention of officials in Ottawa with the concern that if Canada did not do the work, the allies would do it themselves,” the paper says.
The federal cabinet gave the green light to an “interview organization” in April 1953.
In the late 1950s, that organization expanded its work to include debriefings of Canadians — often businesspeople or scientists — following their return from travels in the Soviet bloc, Barnes writes.
“On occasion, travellers were briefed on specific intelligence requirements prior to their trip.”
This activity was now “edging closer” to intelligence collection abroad, “with the attendant personal and political risks,” the paper says.
Canadian military officers and diplomats were part of the International Commission for Supervision and Control that operated in Indochina beginning in 1954.
“Washington was quick to accept Canada’s offer to provide intelligence from the delegation,” Barnes writes. “Over the following years, Canada furnished military, political and economic reporting to the American, British, and later, Australian, intelligence agencies.”
In Cuba, after the U.S. cut off diplomatic relations with the Castro regime, Canada provided Washington with extensive diplomatic reporting from the Canadian Embassy in Havana, the paper notes.
“After the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, at the request of the U.S., Canada stepped up its intelligence collection activities in Cuba by assigning an additional officer full-time to this work.”
At one point, John Starnes, a senior foreign ministry official who would later lead the RCMP’s security service, was approached by a CIA officer who made a strong case for Canada’s engagement in covert intelligence-gathering abroad.
“He was nonplussed by Starnes’ response that he could see no direct benefit to Canada of an organization which would be largely serving the interests of other countries, or any vital government information requirement that could not be more effectively addressed by other means,” the paper says.
The RCMP committed illegal break-ins, stole a Parti Québécois membership list and burned a barn to prevent a meeting from taking place — events that helped spur the formation of the civilian Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 1984.
An early meeting of deputy ministers to discuss the proposed new intelligence service raised the idea of “establishing a separate intelligence gathering unit, particularly with respect to foreign intelligence, along the lines of arrangements in Britain and Australia,” the paper says.
Officials felt economic and commercial intelligence were of growing importance and the distinction between “national security” and “national interest” was often not clear.
But the legislation governing CSIS stopped short of giving the new agency powers to gather foreign intelligence abroad.
It authorizes collection of intelligence related to security — such as a brewing terrorist attack — both inside Canada and overseas, and the gathering of foreign intelligence within Canada at the request of either the minister of foreign affairs or the minister of defence.
The period from the 1990s to 2007 saw a number of proposals for a Canadian foreign intelligence agency “of varying detail and completeness,” Barnes says.
“These proposals were driven by the concerns of officials in Ottawa about how best to adapt Canada’s foreign intelligence capabilities to meet the new demands of post-Cold War conditions and then the new international situation brought about by 9-11,” he writes.
“They reflected Canadian — rather than allied — views of what was needed. But the debate within the bureaucracy was complicated by differing interpretations of what a ‘foreign intelligence agency’ was actually for, and by a blurring of the concepts of ‘foreign’ and ‘security’ intelligence.”
Barnes reports this period was marked by competition between Canada’s foreign ministry and CSIS over which organization should take the lead in intelligence collection activities outside Canada.
“This rivalry currently seems to be in abeyance, but the question has not been settled,” the paper says. “Both organizations likely believe that they are best placed to take on the task if a future government decides to expand Canada’s foreign intelligence collection activities overseas.”
Barnes says the question of money was instrumental to the failure of a mid-1990s proposal for a foreign intelligence agency.
The various proposals over the years for such an agency did not include a full consideration of the cost, he writes. “Most papers downplayed this question, or put it off for later study.”
The most fundamental element missing from those proposals was clarity about what specific information Canada needed to formulate foreign or defence policies “that could only be provided by a new foreign intelligence agency, at an acceptable financial and political cost,” the paper says.
“Most of the proposals put forward only a very general idea of the kind of information that a covert agency might provide, or simply assumed that such an agency would be useful.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 8, 2026
Jim Bronskill, The Canadian Press
Full article: To spy, or not to spy: Canadian government consideration of a foreign intelligence agency, 1945–2007 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/11926422.2026.2634670
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