Has The Government Been Spying On Canadians?

In his final report to Parliament before he leaves his post, commissioner Robert Decary says some of the spying activities at Communications Security Establishment Canada may have affected Canadians in the last year.

However, thanks to poor record-keeping, Decary — a retired judge who has been the agency’s independent watchdog since 2010 — said he can’t be sure.

“A number of CSEC records relating to these activities were unclear or incomplete,” said the report, tabled Wednesday.

“After in-depth and lengthy review, I was unable to reach a definitive conclusion about compliance or non-compliance with the law.”
Source: brandonsun.com

The CSEC’s website states: “CSEC is Canada’s national cryptologic agency. Unique within Canada’s security and intelligence community, CSEC employs code-makers and code-breakers to provide the Government of Canada with information technology security (IT Security) and foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) services. CSEC also provides technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies.”
cse-cst.gc.ca

Another department is Canada’s intelligence community is CSIS. On the CSIS website it states: “The people who work at CSIS collect information in Canada and abroad and use it as the basis for providing advice to the Government of Canada in the form of intelligence reports about activities that may constitute a threat to the security of Canada. This information is collected from many sources, including: members of the public; foreign governments; human sources; technical interception of telecommunications; open sources including newspapers, periodicals, academic journals, foreign and domestic broadcasts, official documents, and other published material. CSIS analysts use their knowledge of regional, national and global issues to assess the quality of information gathered, and to convert the information into useful security intelligence that is shared within the Canadian government and with partners in the security and intelligence community.”
csis-scrs.gc.ca

We are being left to believe that these agencies just simply have “unclear and incomplete” records of any spying they have done on Canadians? I don’t think so!

globalresearch.ca reported this in June 2013:
“the Globe and Mail reported that in November 2011, Defence Minister Peter MacKay signed a secret directive authorizing the CSEC to continue its “mining” of the metadata of Canadians’ telephone and internet communications. The Globe said the program had been first authorized by Bill Graham, Defence Minister in Paul Martin’s Liberal government, in 2005, that is six years earlier.

MacKay, like U.S. President Barack Obama, responded to this revelation of massive state spying by flatly denying that CSEC is “targeting” Canadians or violating constitutional prohibitions on warrantless surveillance of their communications. This lie is predicated on the drawing of a spurious distinction between the metadata created by any electronic communication and the rest of the communication and on the transparently false claim that such information is innocuous.

According to the Globe, a briefing prepared for MacKay in 2011, presumably by CSEC or lawyers within his department, declared, “Metadata is information associated with a telecommunication … And not a communication.”

There is no question that the Canadian government has been spying on it’s citizens. (anyone remember to Toronto G20?) We have been being spied on for many years, and revelations in the main stream like this one. Are only scratching the surface!