The Liberal government has blown past its own deadline to review a major national security law that gave Canada’s security and intelligence agencies sweeping new powers by three years.
Bill C-59 reshaped Canada’s national security landscape in June 2019, establishing the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) Act, making significant changes to how the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) operates, and putting in place civilian review and oversight of the intelligence community for the first time.
Given the significance of the changes, the Liberals wrote into the legislation that Parliament must review the new national security regime within four years, in 2023. That didn’t happen.
Documents obtained by Global News show the chair of the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA) raised the missed deadline with Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree in a November 2025 meeting.
Ten months later, Anandasangaree’s office said it’s not up to him to initiate the review. That power rests with Parliament — where Anandasangaree’s party has held power for the last 11 years.
“Parliamentary reviews are undertaken by Parliament, and their timing is ultimately determined through parliamentary processes,” wrote Simon Lafortune, a spokesperson for Anandasangaree’s office, in a statement to Global News.
“The government remains committed to supporting Parliament in its work, including with respect to the review of national security and intelligence legislation.”
Jean-Yves Duclos, the Liberal chair of the House of Commons’ public safety committee that would likely undertake the parliamentary review, did not respond to a request for comment.
Stephanie Carvin, a professor at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Relations and a former CSIS analyst, said in an interview that the missed deadline speaks to successive federal governments’ “lack of national security interest.”
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“National security legislation in this country tends to follow a crisis,” Carvin said.
Those crises include laws passed after the 9/11 attacks, the Conservatives’ Bill C-51 after the 2014 attack on Parliament, and the Liberals’ response with C-59.
“If you think about the way we pass these bills, we tend to only pass legislation every 10 years, and usually in omnibus legislation,” Carvin said.
“And then we forget about it.”
There is a level of “review fatigue” within Canada’s national security community, Carvin added, after two high-profile public probes into law enforcement and national security agencies’ operations in recent years. The Public Order Emergency Commission in 2022 examined the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act to deal with the Ottawa convoy protests, while in 2024 Justice Marie-Josée Hogue led a months-long inquiry into foreign interference in Canadian politics.
Both shed significant light on how the federal government approaches national security issues and on the operations of various policing, security and intelligence agencies themselves.
At the same time, however, Carvin noted that CSIS has practically been begging the federal government for years to review the legislation that underpins its operations. That hasn’t happened since the 1980s, meaning Canada’s main intelligence agency is still operating within a legal framework established before the internet existed.
CSIS’s 2025 annual report, for instance, suggested that tweaks to its legislation over the last four decades “have been outstripped by the speed of evolving national security threats.”
“Compared to its allies, Canada faces considerable challenges in collecting the intelligence needed to protect Canadians, inform decision-making, and advance Canada’s interests,” the report, released earlier this year, suggested.
The CSE, which functions as both the country’s top cyber defence and espionage agency, is operating in a very different environment than when C-59 made it a distinct entity from the Department of National Defence. The agency, which handles Canada’s cybersecurity and defence as well as digital espionage and signals intelligence, operated away from public scrutiny for most of its existence — but is now working more closely with the private sector and public agencies.
Parliament has not reviewed CSE’s legal authorizations to determine if they’re sufficient for operating in that new context.
“(The CSE Act) is now eight years old, in an era where we’re dealing with different kinds of threats, especially ones driven by AI, new concerns about sovereignty,” Carvin said.
“We are desperate to review to see whether or not the CSE Act is as up to date as needed … and I actually think CSE would welcome that conversation.”
A parliamentary review of the Liberals’ national security legislation would not necessarily cover all those issues. But according to the government’s own law, the review has to be “comprehensive” and assess the effect of C-59 on the operations of CSIS, the CSE and the RCMP, as well as the interaction of those agencies with newly created civilian review and oversight bodies.
That includes the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA), a part-time committee that has a mandate to review any activities or complaints made against CSIS or CSE.
A December 2025 briefing note for Michael Sabia, the country’s top bureaucrat, noted that relations between NSIRA and the intelligence community have been rocky in the first years of the review committee’s operations.
“There are an increasing number of disagreements between the security and intelligence community and NSIRA that either are, or are at risk of, being brought to the courts system for resolution,” the memo, obtained under the access to information law, read.
The briefing note did anticipate there would be a future parliamentary review of Bill C-59 and Canada’s intelligence oversight system, although the details have been censored from the document’s public release.
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