The following is an excerpt from a December 30, 2025 Globe and Mail article by:
- Jody Thomas – retired in 2024 as national security and intelligence adviser to the Prime Minister. She is now a senior adviser with Counsel Public Affairs, and
- Patrick Lennox – an associate fellow of the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.
It’s true that Canada has been able to coast along without this capability to this point. We have relied on our Five Eyes partners to share their products collected and analyzed for their own purposes with us. Our diplomats have filled gaps through their reporting. We’ve excelled at foreign signals intelligence and allowed CSIS to collect security intelligence abroad. But in the storm of the current geopolitical environment, this approach is quickly becoming a glaring vulnerability. Our sovereignty and resilience demand that we discover and know for ourselves what’s happening to us in the world.
As the budget notes in its introductory paragraph, the “nexus between energy security, economic security, and national security is clearer than ever before.” This complex national security landscape, the economic and hybrid warfare our adversaries are waging, and the unstable relationship we have with the United States – whose foreign intelligence capability we have long been reliant upon – leave us exposed like never before. Sticking our heads in the sand and hoping the storm passes is not an acceptable strategy.
In a world as fluid, noisy and unstable as we are in now, not having an all-source intelligence capability to support crucial policy decisions is a major disadvantage. It risks undermining the government’s entire generational investment by leaving us vulnerable to blind spots, deception and manipulation by both our adversaries and allies alike.
Therefore, establishing a foreign human intelligence capability should be a priority. The government could build a stand-alone agency or expand the capabilities and mandates of existing ones. Both would be costly and time-consuming, especially the former; both would be disruptive for a bureaucracy that’s facing deep cuts. But as the government has said about major projects and defence investments, the fact that a challenge is hard should not be an excuse for inaction or complacency.