Book Review: Top Secret Canada: Understanding the Canadian Intelligence and National Security Community
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| Author | Wesley Wark |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/00207020211045395 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
fail to account for women’s (and non-bin ary and other gen der-diverse p eople’s) indi-
vidual integrity. Surely, liberal accountsof self-determination,particularly as expressed in
international law, sufficiently provide for the individual; what Kuokkanen is arguing,
however, is that the individual is only conceived as male. Women’s rights and ob-
jectives are inconsequential to, and hindered by, both Indigenous leaders and the state.
In this way, Kuokkanen’s work also speaks to broader questions of gendering security
to recognize that women are never secure within the patriarchy and that the state
relinquishes its role of protector by both ignoring and perpetuating constant and
quotidian violence against women and girls.
Stephanie Carvin, Thomas Juneau and Craig Forcese, eds.
Top Secret Canada: Understanding the Canadian Intelligence and National Security Community.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 317 pp. $36.95 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-4875-2527-9
Reviewed by: Wesley Wark (wwark@cigionline.org), Centre for International Governance
Innovation
To understand the Canadian security and intelligence community requires clever
navigation of the vacuum created by the general failure of Canadian government
transparency. The vacuum has been sustained by the bewildering lack of interest in the
subject of national security displayed by the Canadian academic community at large.
The first effort made to publish a description of the Canadian intelligence community in
some holistic way occurred two decades ago and took the shape of a meagre pamphlet
produced by the Privy Council Office. Only in 2019 did we see a more useful update,
produced in the first annual report from the National Security and Intelligence
Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP).
The need for a collection such as this might thus seem self-evident. The essays are
short, informative, and well-written. The assembled authors represent top-notch and
respected talent drawn from the very small pool of Canadian experts. Yet, in trying to
produce a useful map of the Canadian intelligence system, the collection as a whole
confronts two challenges –one is secrecy and the other is the tempo of change.
Top Secret Canada, despite its nifty title, does not actually discuss the secrecy
challenge head-on, but its effects can be found in efforts to penetrate some of the less
well-known elements of the Canadian system. Stephanie Carvin, in her essay on the
Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre (ITAC), rightly points to it as an interesting
test case for the value of an intelligence fusion centre. Unfortunately, the history of
ITAC is sufficiently obscure to prevent any telling of its surprising evolution from the
original model, titled the Integrated Threat Assessment Centre, established in 2004 and
promoted as part of the first-ever government National Security Policy, to the more
Book Reviews 479
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