Give politicians access to top-secret security data, Senate urges

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It's high time that Canada's lawmakers were entrusted with keeping a close and watchful eye on secret government agents, a new Senate report says.

The key finding of the report, tabled Wednesday, is that a select few MPs and senators should be given privileged access to top secrets. This recommendation amounts to a frontal challenge of a security bureaucracy that has long felt politicians too untrustworthy and partisan to be tasked with serious review.

"They should get over it," Senator Hugh Segal said in an interview Tuesday. "Because last I checked this is a parliamentary democracy."

Even as the Senate called for structural change, a deeply divided House of Commons committee urged that Canada's top spymaster resign.

Last year, Richard Fadden, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said in a broadcast interview that some provincial and municipal politicians had been co-opted by foreign powers. When Parliament summoned him to explain his remarks and name names, he said he could not divulge details because federal politicians were not sufficiently cleared to hear them. On Wednesday, the opposition-led House of Commons national security committee issued a report calling for Mr. Fadden to step down.

Under the status quo, MPs and senators - even ones who sit on national-security committees - are on the outside looking in. They have limited security clearances and often are inexpert in national security matters. This state of affairs can lead to stonewalling, showboating and standoffs.

Mr. Segal, a Conservative who chairs the Special Senate Committee on Anti-Terrorism, says Canada is the only G8 nation where legislators don't get to closely scrutinize the secret actions of security agencies.

Past attempts to give parliamentarians access to Ottawa's most protected secrets have failed. But the Senate committee suggests it would be relatively easy for Canada to adapt an oversight model used by Britain.

The idea is that the prime minister would appoint a standing group of trusted and bipartisan lawmakers. The MPs and senators would be rigorously vetted prior to being given sweeping security clearances to call witnesses and peruse documents.

Then they would review the real-time activities of CSIS, the RCMP and the Department of National Defence, among other agencies. They would kick their reports up to the prime minister, who would have to make sanitized versions public.

During the past decade, the federal government has called in three senior judges to probe the secret activities of the RCMP and CSIS. These federal inquiries cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, yet key recommendations have not been embraced by Ottawa.

The Senate committee's "Positive Steps Ahead" report suggests a host of problems continue to afflict Canada's security structures. It says there is a lack of cohesion among security agencies, given that the federal bureaucracy's national security adviser generally lacks powers to pull them together.