Liberals blow past deadline to review major national security law

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.”

“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.

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.