Intelligence Analysis and Policy Making: The Canadian Experience

Canada is a key member of the world's most important international intelligence-sharing partnership, the Five Eyes, along with the US, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. Until now, few scholars have looked beyond the US to study how effectively intelligence analysts support policy makers, who rely on timely, forward-thinking insights to shape high-level foreign, national security, and defense policy.

  Intelligence Analysis and Policy Making provides the first in-depth look at the relationship between intelligence and policy in Canada. Thomas Juneau and Stephanie Carvin, both former analysts in the Canadian national security sector, conducted seventy in-depth interviews with serving and retired policy and intelligence practitioners, at a time when Canada's intelligence community underwent sweeping institutional changes.

  Juneau and Carvin provide critical recommendations for improving intelligence performance in supporting policy―with implications for other countries that, like Canada, are not superpowers but small or mid-sized countries in need of intelligence that supports their unique interests.

Thomas Juneau is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and the author of Squandered Opportunity: Neoclassical Realism and Iranian Foreign Policy (Stanford, 2015). Stephanie Carvin is Associate Professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University and the author of Stand on Guard: Reassessing Threats to Canada's National Security (2021).