When CSIS director Dan Rogers meets staff at one of the spy agency’s offices across the country, there comes a time when he asks the bosses to leave the room.
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he → meet → room
Then, he asks spy agency staff how thing are really going.
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thing → ask → staff
There’s good reason for the head of the spy agency — who marked two years on the job earlier this month — to want to put his ear directly to the ground.
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who → ’ → ground
CSIS has a morale issue.
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CSIS → have → issue
It has a red tape problem.
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It → have → problem
And above all, it has a serious leadership trust issues.
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it → have → issues
In an interview alongside CSIS’s deputy director Vanessa Lloyd and human resources head Jesse Schwartz, Rogers candidly acknowledges those problems.
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Rogers → acknowledge → problems
In fact, he’s brutally honest in his assessment of the service.
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he → ’ → service
The agency is full of passionate people who are extremely dedicated to their mission of keeping Canada safe.
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who → keep → Canada
But it’s also struggling.
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it → struggle → ?
“CSIS is strained,” he told National Post.
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he → strain → Post
“We have an organization that is extremely overtaxed in an extraordinarily complex environment, and people do hard work in stressful environments every day.”
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people → have → environments
Rogers may lead one of the most mysterious and shadowy agencies in the country, but he spends a lot of his time thinking not about spy stuff… but about culture change.
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he → lead → change
The poll suggested only half (51 per cent) of CSIS respondents believed senior managers “lead by example in ethical behaviour.”
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managers → suggest → behaviour
Far fewer (40 per cent) said they had confidence in top management, whereas barely 29 per cent believed senior management makes “effective and timely decisions.”
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management → say → decisions
Just over half (56 per cent) said they had the tools, technology and equipment to do their job.
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they → say → job
Nearly one in five (17 per cent) of respondents said they’d been harassed in the previous 12 months.
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they → say → months
That’s on top of repeat allegations of racism, sexism, a “macho” environment and even sexual assault over the last decade within the secretive service.
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That → ’ → service
Notably, in 2017, then-Director David Vigneault issued a statement acknowledging “serious concerns surrounding retribution, favouritism, bullying and other inappropriate behaviour” in the service’s Toronto office.
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Vigneault → issue → office
Issues with trust and ethics are of particular concern at CSIS because the spy agency has tremendous and invasive investigative power.
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agency → have → power
With the proper ministerial authorization, agents can even break the law to advance an investigation.
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agents → break → investigation
The agency is also required to act quickly to detect and respond to imminent national security threats.
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agency → require → threats
Red tape and overly complex internal processes are likely to complicate that mission.
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tape → complicate → mission
Last year, National Post revealed that Rogers sent a memo to staff in June 2025 acknowledging the “disappointing and unacceptable” PSES results.
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Rogers → reveal → results
Culture change would become his and management’s “overriding priority,” he wrote, because the current environment was hampering CSIS’s ability to deliver on its critical national security role.
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environment → become → role
“Habits are hard to change,” said Schwartz in the recent interview in which she, Rogers and Lloyd listed a number of changes they were implementing following his memo.
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they → change → memo
One is improving communication by having senior executives speak more directly to their staff and vice-versa.
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executives → improve → versa
Executives need to speak more directly to their reports, and employees are encouraged to write directly to a senior leader, and even the director himself.
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employees → need → leader
“You can make all the right decisions as a senior manager, but if people never know who you are, they don’t know your values, and they don’t hear the context about why you made the decision that you made, and they don’t feel like you’re being earnest with them, and you’re just this nameless, faceless thing that exists and communicates them through an email or a very corporate speak message
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that → make → email
, they might assume the worst,” Rogers said.
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Rogers → assume → worst
A second is making it clear to executives that their priority over the next year was to focus on “key elements of our workforce”, such as creating a better team environment.
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priority → make → environment
It’s now part of their performance reviews and directly impacts their bonus.
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It → ’ → bonus
Another is hiring more, faster and addressing critical staffing gaps.
For Schwartz, the head of HR, much time has been spent speeding up recruitment and the infamously slow enhanced top secret security clearance process.
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time → hire → recruitment
There is no lack of applicants to the spy agency, she said, but getting them through the door has not always been easy.
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getting → be → door
She said she’s worked to cut down on hiring “bottlenecks”, speed up the clearance process such as by hiring more polygraph operators, and avoiding redundancies in the process.
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she → say → process
“So this year we have (hiring) targets.
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we → have → targets
Next year, we have more ambitious targets because we know that this year we’re going to take a bit of time to build the capacity because we hadn’t been doing it for a while.
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we → have → while
I expect that that trajectory gets better,” Rogers explained.
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Rogers → expect → ?
He also said the service has “really fundamentally adjusted the way that we do training, the way that we classify people in positions” in the name of efficiency.
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we → say → efficiency
Because of CSIS’s secret mandate, much of the work done to protect Canada’s national security like foiling a terrorist plot or preventing sabotage on Canadian infrastructure goes unrecognized.
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much → do → infrastructure
…and 30 more, not listed.
The Aporia
