Matthew A. MacDonald is an Ottawa-based filmmaker and political scientist who has taught at Carleton University.
With tensions between Canada and the U.S. at an all-time high, Canadians are thinking more seriously about national security and defence.
But a core component of that conversation is often forgotten: intelligence. That must change.
In 1977, the government established the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the RCMP, known as the McDonald Commission. Like the Mackenzie Commission a decade earlier, it recommended disbanding the RCMP Security Service – which was responsible for intelligence operations at the time – and creating a new civilian intelligence service. Eventually, Ottawa created the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in 1984.
In its final report, the Mackenzie Commission emphasized that the state must “protect its secrets from espionage, its information from unauthorized disclosure, its institutions from subversion and its policies from clandestine influence.” But it warned that we must think carefully about “the organizations and procedures established ... to meet this responsibility in an area which can touch closely upon the fundamental freedoms of the individual.”
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Yet for many in Canada’s intelligence community, Canada lacks the intelligence culture needed to understand, let alone think carefully about, these things – something I learned over the past year, meeting with more than 30 former CSIS officers and others in Canada’s intelligence community to develop a major documentary series called The Service, as CSIS is known.
But worse, many Canadians don’t even know what CSIS is, according to a 2025 survey conducted by Ekos Research. It found that only half of respondents were able to identify CSIS as the government agency responsible for investigating threats to Canada, and almost 20 per cent said they had never heard of it. When CSIS is in the news, it’s often the result of an intelligence failure, and the public is wont to criticize it, despite lacking the full picture and often the vocabulary or understanding needed.
That’s not to say that people should just take CSIS at its word. But unless you understand something, how can you think carefully about it?
For example: do most Canadians know what intelligence officers and analysts do? What powers CSIS does and doesn’t have? Do Canadians understand the relationship between CSIS and the government, the RCMP, or agencies in other countries? The distinction between intelligence and evidence?
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But it goes deeper than that. Do Canadians appreciate the moral, ethical, legal, political, and even psychological and spiritual complexity of this kind of work, and the toll it can take on a person? Do they appreciate the political complexity of intelligence? Do they know, for instance, that the F-35 Lightning II jets Canada plans to acquire rely on U.S.-controlled intelligence mission data, developed and validated at the F-35 Reprogramming Laboratory at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, and that, if Ottawa decides to withhold certain intelligence, or does anything else to irritate the U.S., Washington could theoretically retaliate by withholding this intelligence, compromising our jets and our pilots? They likely wouldn’t – unless they try to invade Canada, which seems implausible – but it’s a political and intelligence consideration I doubt most Canadians have ever contemplated, and it shows how complex these issues can be.
It’s not just about technical jargon and geopolitics. Alan Jones, a former assistant director of CSIS, told me in an interview that he wishes Canadians would see the people who work for the service as the neighbours that they are: Canadians trying their best to serve their country. In fact, I think so many intelligence professionals have agreed to participate in my documentary series because someone is finally telling them that their service to Canada matters, and then asking them a follow-up they so rarely hear: what was it really like?
Virtually everyone in Canada’s intelligence community that I’ve spoken with agrees: if Canadians are kept in the dark unnecessarily, the less confidence they’ll have in their intelligence agencies’ effectiveness and integrity, and the less they‘ll understand why this work matters.
For his part, Mr. Jones wishes Canadians would judge the people of CSIS based on how they might respond in a similar situation, not what they “see on the internet or a Hollywood movie.” The problem is that most Canadians have never faced anything like the situations people in Canada’s intelligence community face. And unless these stories are told, how can they hope to understand how difficult and complex and important this work is, or what it takes to do it morally and ethically, let alone legally? And if they can’t do that, how can they think carefully about it at all?