Speeches and Presentations

Talking Points for W.P.D. Elcock Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service at the Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies Carleton University

June 12, 2002

This invitation gives me a chance to acknowledge the efforts of Jacques Shore, Martin Rudner and others to establish this Centre. The circumstances of the past year have engaged people in the subject matter of terrorism – some in ways that border on the macabre and others out of a sincere desire to learn more about the topic and to contribute to the public discussion.

Clearly people have come here out of a desire to learn. For my part, I accepted the invitation to lend my support to your efforts

I was invited this morning to chair a discussion on threat assessments and requirements, and I do not intend to stray far from my assignment.

I don’t want to miss this opportunity to try to clarify the role of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in foreign intelligence collection, because I have seen some confusion in public discussions about this aspect of our mandate, and foreign intelligence broadly writ is on the agenda.

Hopefully my comments will clarify what is a rather complicated subject, although I recognize that given the nature of the subject matter, I will leave some questions unsatisfied, and may even raise some new ones.

To understand the role of CSIS in foreign intelligence, you need to know that there are a couple of sections of the CSIS Act that authorize us to collect, analyze and report to government on threats to the security of Canada.

The first is section 12, which establishes the operational mandate of the Service: “... to conduct investigations into potential threats to the security of Canada.”

a) espionage or sabotage
b) foreign influence activities
c) activities that threaten or employ serious violence
d) acts of subversion

The words of section 2 may be read by some as quite narrow. In fact, however, they have proved to be sufficiently broad to support investigations of a number of threats which might not be immediately obvious.

There is no restriction in the Act on where the Service may collect information on these potential threats. There is nothing in the legislation that prohibits us from collecting information on these threats from anywhere in Canada or – and what is more to the point – anywhere abroad.

Indeed, certain types of information related to potential threats to the security of Canada may be better collected abroad than in Canada. I should also note here, to come back to the issue of foreign intelligence, that some of that information may respond to the broad foreign intelligence requirements of the Government of Canada.

To go a step further, in addition to threat-related intelligence, Section 19 of the Act also allows the Service to provide to government incidentally collected intelligence which is not threat related from any CSIS operation.

CSIS has carried out operations overseas in support of its section 12 mandate in the past, and we will continue to do so as circumstances dictate. Whether we do so or not depends less on issues of mandate than it does on the benefits of such operations weighed against risks and costs – the same judgements that any other intelligence service would make in considering such operations.

I should say – and this may sound like double talk as I say it – that to some extent, the misunderstandings about our role in the collection of intelligence outside of Canada are quite understandable. That is because in its early years, CSIS was struggling to establish an identity.

It was important at the time to focus the efforts of the new service in terms of the activities that preoccupied by far the majority of our investigations. That led all of us to emphasize the domestic and defensive nature of those activities.

Efforts to describe the organization in these terms were not done to obscure the scope of our section 12 mandate. There wasn’t much need to do so because, with all of the other pressures of creating a new Service, there was not much time to run operations abroad.

As the Service has matured and developed the necessary expertise, we have, within our mandate, expanded our operations overseas progressively. Indeed, someone who retired even two or three years ago would be surprised at the complexity and scope of the operations we now run.

To correct one other misconception, our overseas operations do not involve our Liaison Officers posted in foreign countries. What is not often understood is that that fact has little or nothing to do with our ability to successfully carry out overseas operations.

The government made new resources available to us in the last budget that will ensure we have the means to allow us to meet the current challenges, including increased operations overseas. When clear threats to the security of Canada are involved, we can and will go anywhere to get what we need.

Now that I have dealt with our Section 12 mandate and its ability to satisfy some of the foreign intelligence requirements of the government, let me move to the source of some of the confusion, which is based in references in the CSIS Act to the collection of “foreign intelligence”.

The legislation limits our latitude to collect what is defined in the Act as “foreign intelligence”. “Foreign intelligence” is defined inter alia as information about the “capabilities, intentions and activities” of a foreign state. This definition is found in Section 16 of the legislation.

Section 16 allows the Service to collect information or intelligence relating to the capabilities, intentions or activities of:

a) any foreign state or group of foreign states, or
b) anyone other than:
- a Canadian citizen,
- a permanent resident, or
- a Canadian corporation

Unlike Section 12, which deals with threats to the security of Canada, Section 16 pertains to non-threat related intelligence, for example, to Canada’s international competitiveness.

“Foreign intelligence” as defined in the Act can only be collected in Canada, at the request of the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, or the Minister of National Defence. As I have said before, while our priority has been and remains threat related intelligence, foreign intelligence collection as defined under Section 16 has grown considerably since 1984.

So does that mean that what we collect under Sections 12 and 16 will satisfy all the foreign intelligence requirements of the Government of Canada? The self-evident answer is no. In part that is because regardless of the authority under which we are conducting investigations, our priority, particularly now, is threats to the security of Canada not Canada’s foreign intelligence requirements, particularly terrorist threats. Secondly, section 16 does not allow us to collect foreign intelligence as defined in the CSIS Act outside of Canada, except in so far as such intelligence is incidentally collected under another section of the Act such as Section 12.

Date modified: 2005-11-14