Trudeau creates Canada's National Security Council

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the new National Security Council will be responsible for "overseeing" the new challenges the country "increasingly faces" and setting "strategic direction" to combat them.

Following cabinet reshuffles on Wednesday this week, the Prime Minister's Office said the changes would affect more than just the Cabinet. "In the coming weeks" a National Security Council will be set up, with its roster to be announced very soon.

In a statement to the media, Alison Murphy, spokesperson for the Prime Minister's Office, called the Security Council "a new forum for ministers to discuss and address issues that are pressing domestic and international security concerns for Canada."

When asked why a cabinet-level council was needed, and how the National Security Council would differ from existing government structures that work in this area, Trudeau did not give a detailed answer, but promised that details would be revealed once the council is established.

"It is an additional tool on top of the other ones we have, and we're very excited about presenting [it] to Canadians. We're working right now, and will be making an announcement in the coming weeks about how it's going to work," Trudeau said.

The decision to create the new council came amid months of scrutiny of the federal government, amid allegations of foreign interference and a number of stories about federal security and intelligence agencies having trouble tracking emerging threats and sharing information across agencies.

The Prime Minister said the establishment of the Council is a way for the government to try and strengthen its capacity to respond to national security challenges after the 2017 scrapping of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP).

"We know there have been real challenges, increasingly from foreign states who want to destabilize our democracies, from internal actors who are trying to sow chaos," explained Justin Trudeau. "One of the big debates we had when we replaced the Conservative government of Stephen Harper was the need to put parliamentarians in charge of overseeing our national security agencies… where parliamentarians from every party get to come together and see everything that our top national security agencies, all our national agencies are doing," the Prime Minister added.

However, in its most recent annual report, NSICOP, as the key oversight body for national security agencies, noted that it has had difficulty for 5 years trying to obtain information from various government agencies:

"Some departments selectively refused to provide information even though the information fell within a request for information from the committee," the report states. "In several cases, the committee came across the information later or through other sources, such as subsequent media reporting based on information disclosed by those very departments under the Access to Information Act."

The government has also not yet decided on a public inquiry into foreign interference. New Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc told a press conference after the cabinet shake-up that talks were still underway between the Liberal Party and its opposition on what that public process should look like and expressed hope that the talks would succeed.