Ep 61 A Sleuth of CSIS Issues -- The C-59 Revamp

Stephanie and Craig return to their re-review of bill C-59, as it wends its way through Senate. Today, they address the CSIS Act changes — and bring back Bob from Mordor and his merry band of plotters to play a cameo role. First up: criminal law immunity for certain approved conduct that would otherwise constitute an offence, undertaken by CSIS employees or sources in the collection of intelligence. Then: CSIS’s powers of threat reduction were a controversial addition in bill C-51 (2015), and are renovated by C-59 in way that makes them more likely to be constitutional and certainly less unbounded. Finally: C-59 creates a new system for CSIS to collect, retain and query bulk datasets, an issue that has been controversial in the past (because CSIS was doing it when it should not have been). The C-59 dataset regime places this intelligence practice on a legal footing. The result is complicated — but it is complicated for a reason. Your INTREPID team does their best to walk through the “why” and the “what” of all these powers.